“Rut” – a grave with both ends knocked out!)
Come, my beloved, let us go out into the country… . There I will give you my love.
Song of Solomon 7:11-12
I’m indebted to Dennis and Barbara Rainey of Family Life for this idea. See how much of this resonates with you.
I don’t know what being in a rut means to you, but at our house it sometimes looks like this:
- Up before sunrise, have a few words together, maybe enjoy a cup of coffee and hot tea, exchange a kiss on the cheek and it’s hi-ho it’s off to work we go.
- Barb generally moves to the living room where she has set up one of her traveling office spaces and gets to work. I read my five chapters in Psalms for the day and pray over several of my prayer list folks. I return up to 200 emails that have come in, write a blog for my preacher for next Sunday’s sermon follow up.
- Barb deals with endless issues involving the laundry, chores, errands, doctors and conflicts, getting blogs out for two ministries (one of them ours) creating mailings, sending receipts for donations, managing issues with our grown children and theirs, and on top of that, she has me to deal with.
- Meanwhile, I juggle budgets, a couple of consulting clients and meetings and problem solving all day long.
- Even though we office out of our home, our paths seldom cross again until around 6 P.M., after both of us have emptied about 90 percent of our tanks. We take a glance at the news, sometimes eat dinner, flip through the mail, pay some bills, clean up the dishes, edit writings for each other. Then we may catch a little TV before we toddle off to bed between 10:30 and 11:00pm.
That’s the drill.
But there is no imagination in any of that. I’m not saying that a typical day can routinely accommodate wild swings of adventure, but I’ll tell you this (if you haven’t noticed already):
A routine is just a few letters away from being shortened to a rut. A rut you will never escape unless you make up your mind in advance to do so. And I guarantee that your “rut” will never be on the same page as “romance” in your marital dictionary.
When the TV show Desperate Housewives first began its iconic rise into our national awareness, Newsweek did a feature article on the phenomenon. I remember one of the women who was interviewed lamenting, “Don’t you remember the time when he kissed you with a kiss that launched a thousand kisses?” If you cannot, there is something desperately wrong at your house. Is there ever any room for that in the middle of your routine?
What sorts of traditions, celebrations and dates do you do on purpose? If there are none, then your lives will simply leak out one day at a time until your rut becomes a grave and then it will be too late.
One Final Note
Discuss
Ready to spice up the routine? How would you do it if you could? (You can, you know.)
Pray
Ask the Creator for a delightful dose of His creativity to give you a break from the routine.
More on spicing up your lives in the middle of your routines when we greet you again.
