– Scripture:

 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking around life and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, which always drags you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you and develops a well-formed maturity in you.

                            Romans 12:1–2 (MSG)

 – Reflection:

                 Staying Energized & OnFire

What a great challenge for us men today. It dares us to engage our God-given capacities for imagining and inventing. But, it also dares to direct these capacities toward good purposes, toward God’s purposes. Too often, we use our imaginations to envision prosperous futures for ourselves, futures of comfort, materialism, and separation. We use them to envision worrisome futures where our worst fears come to pass. And too often, we use our inventiveness to build our prosperity or barricades around our lives to protect ourselves from our fears.

 Where do we go from here?

What if we stopped doing that so much? What if, in faith, we were to refocus these imaginative and inventive capacities? What if we put them toward keeping ourselves and those around us “energized and burning”? What if we dedicated a few moments every week, every month to look at ourselves, our families, our friends, and our communities and allowed ourselves to dream and create? We wouldn’t be alone. God, the Holy Spirit, would be right there in those moments, guiding and inspiring us.

 Our Prayer for Today

Father, it’s not easy to change how we think and how we act. We need your help. Allow us a few minutes to pray and listen for the Holy Spirit. Let us be still. As we consider how you might encourage “love and good deeds” in our family, friends, and community. Whatever comes, if it fits within the principles of Scripture, we trust it and know you will make it happen. Amen.