DAY 21 | LIFE AT THE MARGINSž ž 

centering thought

“Without slotting a few ‘dependability blocks’ into our weekly agenda, the pressures of daily life will pull us in a thousand directions, none of which involve seeing, serving, or loving someone else.”

encouragement from God’s word 

Read: HEBREWS 10:24-25

devotional direction

Have you ever noticed that we tend to fill the space that we have? If we switch out a small purse for a large purse, we tend to stuff that new purse full. If we reach for a large dinner plate instead of a small dinner plate, we are likely to put more food on our plate. If we move from a cozy apartment to a three-bedroom home, it won’t be long before every last closet is bursting with who-knows-what. And what’s true for handbags and dishes and homes is true for daily life too. 

We are given a fresh twenty-four hours each and every day, and yet if we’re not careful, those hours will be frittered away on self-indulgent needs and whims. If we don’t schedule the sorts of activities that God says ought to be true of our days, then those activities will never get done.

For too many of us today, the writer of Hebrews’s exhortation hits us like a glass of water, splashed in our face. “Think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works”? Who has time for that?

Which is perhaps exactly the point. 

To live as those who follow Christ, we must actually follow Christ, who rhythmically went away alone to pray, crafted magnetizing stories to impart the gospel, saw fit to visit friends who were in desperate need, and encouraged those who’d been fractured by life in a broken world that they could be made whole again. 

And so the task at hand: May we set aside time to tend to another’s soul, in the same manner that Christ has done for us.

question to ponder

What time have you blocked off on today’s agenda to intentionally see and serve someone else?