Bread

Lisa asked me to stop at the local Safeway recently to pick up a loaf of bread that was on sale. I don't even remember the brand anymore due to the flood of choices that awaited me at the store. She said the brand was something like "Nature's Own" but when I began to look at my choices I saw things like: "Nature's Cupboard", "Nature's Pantry", "Nature's Pride", "Open Pantry", "Nature's Bakery",  "Open Cupboard" and on and on it went. I stood there frozen in confusion. I think I finally just bought something that had a plain label and was cheap - "Wheat Bread'!!

Our culture increasingly is a world filled with choices and it is not just in breads or cereal or coffee shops but involves ideas, priorities, lifestyles, morality and everything else. Rarely does our world attach any labels on these choices as though one might actually be the right choice but they all receive equal validity. In our culture's quest for valuing personal choice and a "unified" diversity we really end up awash in chaos and a lack of any defining clarity.

As believers we often fall into a similar "chaos". In words we claim that the Lord is at the center but we too often disconnect that center from all the details of our surrounding days as we constantly change priorities and effectively fail to have a unifying ground to our decisions and purposes. I love Zechariah 14:9 - "And the Lord will be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one."  A day is coming when that truth will be recognized by everyone but for us we know it to be true now! For those of us in whom the Holy Spirit dwells there is only one focus, only one choice about the ruling element of my day,only one choice about the grounding point of all my hours - it's Jesus and nothing else! Today, at all times and in all places lets make Jesus our preoccupation and worship our every activity.