A Spiritual Lesson from a Dying Phone Battery
For some time now, I’ve been dealing with a phone on its last legs. (Update: after brainstorming this article, I was able to get a new phone. Whew.) If you’ve ever had to deal with that, you know that it can be frustrating.
The phone would seem to be fine. The battery clipping along near 100%…until it wasn’t. In rapid succession, I’d get a notification that it was at something like 14%, then (one second later) 7%, then…dead. The other issue was that, if it got to zero, it took hours to charge back up. Once it was, I had to keep it basically plugged in non-stop so the battery wouldn’t just drop to zero again. Oh, and keeping a phone plugged in sort of defeats the purpose of a cell phone!
Anyway, that oddity, frustrating though it was, got me to thinking about my spiritual walk.
We live in a time where people want to be on fire all the time. Now, that is great. We need to be faithful to the Lord at all times. But what I am talking about is the “buzz” you sometimes receive when you go to something like Polishing the Pulpit or Lads to Leaders, or the feeling you have just after a youth devotional. We sometimes talk about how we are on a spiritual high after those types of things.
And that’s great.
Unless…we then just drop to zero a short time later!
I have known people–young people as well as adults–who would get all fired up at church camp or CYC, but two or three weeks later, they were not even at worship. You would rarely see them until it was time for the next “pump you up” event. At that point, they would jump in, get all excited…and then drop out once more after a short time.
Again, it is fine to have those moments when you seem to be soaring in your faith. I’m not arguing against that, and it is, in many ways, a great blessing to our walk.
But we can’t go from 100 to zero! Instead, we need to take the excitement of those big moments and use them to help us keep our “battery” charged for the foreseeable future. We might dip down a little at times, but instead of needed a huge event to build us back up, think about how you typically use your phone.
You charge it much more regularly.
Simple things like prayer, Bible study, personal devotion, regular worship, time with Christian family. These are designed, in part, to help us stay charged spiritually for the inevitable “drain” the world is going to put us through.
(Then, when those big events happen? It’s more like getting a new battery instead of being the only way our battery is recharged!)
AUTHOR: Adam Faughn