Lately, I have been recognizing that my life is divided, fairly cleanly I might add, into buckets. While I suppose there are many separate buckets. Really, I can boil it all down into two: the God bucket and the Blake’s life bucket. On the one hand there is the God bucket. This bucket is filled with the time I spend with God: prayer, Bible study, walks outside and the like. On the other hand there is the Blake’s life bucket. This bucket is filled with everything else: family, drives to and from work, bills, housework, and many other such assorted things. Up until recently, I have kept the two pretty much apart. I couldn’t imagine how the two could ever come together. Or maybe more accurately, I couldn’t figure out how to integrate the two without creating a mess.

Here’s what I mean. If you looked into my God bucket you would find a bevy of spiritual practices: prayer, Bible study, quite time, and solitude. These are just a few of the things that fill my God bucket. These are, after all, how I am supposed to spend time with God. What you wouldn’t find were thing like playing with my kids, drinking a cup of coffee, taking a nap, or reading a book that I enjoyed. These all belong in the life bucket. They were part of life but not really part of engaging with God. How could anyone possibly spend time with God by reading a book? Gasp! Just the thought sends chills.

This two bucket system has served me fairly well over my life. I would have my God time and then my life time. This all worked neatly and cleanly until recently when God began asking to be let out of His “God time.” He wanted to go for walks too. He was really interested in the books I was reading. He wanted to play with the kids, and He really wanted to get invited to Saturday night dinners. They are huge at our house. This really messed me up because I didn’t know how to do it. Sure, I wanted God to come along, but making it a reality was not so easy. The only way I knew to spend time with God was engaging in a spiritually oriented behaviors. The last time I checked, my kids weren’t all that interested in practicing solitude during play time. They wanted to throw the ball around. Saturday dinners are a whole lot messier when you start inserting Bible study and journaling. No. That just wouldn’t work. But God wouldn’t let up. He wanted to tag along. He wanted out of His bucket. I just couldn’t figure out how to do it, mostly because I couldn’t wrap my mind around how I could possibly spend time with God apart from engaging in a religious behavior.

When I couldn’t figure it out, I asked God to figure it out for me. I probably should have done that to begin with. He usually gives me the answer I need right away. God led me to meditate on Romans 12.1-21. Here’s how that passage starts out, “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is true worship.” These first words hit me like a ton of bricks. True worship—aka God time—isn’t found in religious acts. Sure, we can worship God in and through religious acts but that isn’t the worship God wants. God wants our bodies. He wants us to give Him all we are and all we have. He is pleased with this. He wants us to drink coffee as an act of worship, to play with our kids as an act of worship, to have huge Saturday dinners as an act of worship. How? By offering it to Him. By engaging in all things with a recognition that God is with us, part of what we are doing. By recognizing that He wants to speak to us and through us in every circumstance of life. By living to bring Him glory in and through all we do.

So here is what I am doing. I am starting to see all things as an offering to God. I am seeking to do all things with God, inviting Him along. I am on the lookout for ways to have God be part of everything I am doing. I am finding that God can be a whole lot of fun when we let Him out of His bucket. He has a whole lot to say and a whole lot of love to share. So my encouragement to you is to let him out of the bucket.

Blake
Spiritual Formation Pastor