God The Maytag Repairman

I'm not sure why, but I tend to analyze things to an extreme, and most often, I do it by fitting the thing into some kind of analogy. I love me some good analogy, if you hadn't noticed.

Not long ago, I had to get my clothes dryer fixed. It was taking me three hours to dry a load of clothes and this is a problem when you have three kids and are basically laundry-challenged to begin with. A dryer that worked would be just about life-changing.

It turned out that the heating element was shot, and when I was having coffee on the patio later, an analogy started weaving itself in my brain.  Fixing my dryer was reminding me a lot of my spiritual walk, and the restrictions I try to put on God when something in my walk needs fixing.

My dryer wasn't dead, it wasn't even necessarily broken. It was functioning. It was spinning, it was tossing the clothes around; it just wasn't accomplishing anything. All of this energy used for nothing was costing me a lot of money and it was having a domino effect in my life; I was getting more and more behind, we never had enough clean clothes and the growing piles were making me crazy.

My faith wasn't dead, it was alive and functioning. There was a lot of activity going on, but there was no growth, no joy, no sense of accomplishment.  A lot of work with no return, really. Just going through the motions.  All of this was costing me something, too. Frustration, feeling like a failure, wondering why I couldn't be the vital, fruit-bearing Christian I was supposed to be. Losing out on seeing God move. 

I realized, too, that the problem with my spiritual life was a lot like the problem with my dryer: they were both having trouble with their heating element.  God's Word, and a lot of Christian teachings, make reference to spiritual fire; that burning, powerful alive-ness inside us that comes from really living our faith and constantly seeking intimacy with God. That spiritual heating element inside us is a lot like the one in our dryers; it requires upkeep and maintenance. You gotta clean the lint out of the filter and keep the hoses clear, you know what I mean?

When the guy came to fix the dryer, I was disappointed that he was going to have to pull the thing out and take it apart to fix it. Somehow, I was hoping he could just kind of reboot it. I had called an expert to come fix it, but I wanted him to fix it in a way that was convenient for me. I do that to God, too.

I find that I have a habit of asking God to fix a problem (usually created by me) and then telling Him how I want Him to fix it. This takes a lot of nerve, when you think about it. I cry out in panic, God comes running, and then I give Him a lot of stipulations. "Lord, thank You so much for coming when I called, and I really need You to make this right. But, could you do it without taking my whole life apart, please? Could You do it without making a mess? Would You please fix this part that isn't working without removing any parts I'm okay with?"

What I'm telling God is that I want Him to make the problem go away without actually working on the parts of me that caused the problem.

The thing is, God's not into instruction too much, at least, not from me. His response is something along the lines of, "I not only built this dryer, I created the materials that made it, the atoms and molecules that form the materials, and as a matter of fact-the air it heats. So, would you like me to fix it, or would you like to try?"

When I really gave this some thought, I ended up asking myself what I could possibly be afraid of. So what if God has free reign when He works on me? He invented me. He knows how to keep my heating element working.