Blended Life

Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters—that you may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace. … For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive. Jeremiah 29:5-14

It's not just the good stuff; it's not just the bad stuff; it's all of the stuff.

God blends all of your life together. There is a time to build houses, a time to plant gardens, a time to take a spouse and a time to beget sons and daughters. But all those activities must be blended together. If you spend too much time building your house during planting season, you will have nothing to harvest, but if you spend too much time planting, you will have no shelter. If you beget sons and daughters before you take a spouse, you will have committed adultery. In addition to blending the productive stuff of life, you have to blend in the negative stuff of life. You have to blend in the time for the repairs from the kitchen fire with the weeding and pest control. As you blend all the priorities of building, planting, begetting, fighting fires and pulling weeds, you maintain the life sustaining environment of your farm.

You  aren't to be married to any process of getting to know God; you're supposed to be married to God.

The process of getting to know God is not simply planting, fertilizing and harvesting. It requires blending your relationship with Him amid the fires, pestilence and frosts that come in the various seasons of life. Knowing God means bringing Him with you as you take a spouse, pull weeds and fight fires. You may feel closer to God in the sweat and heat of pulling weeds as you work alongside Him, but as you get to know Him better, you feel just as close to Him when you are painting as when you are plowing.You should begin to develop your relationship with God where you find it the easiest to connect with Him. God isn’t limited to one function. As you pursue your relationship with God, you will find Him in more places than that one task you first found Him in. You will find Him in your house, your garden and your barn. 

Live each day in a way that will make you feel good about yourself tomorrow.

Perhaps the barn, garden and house are not yours, and you are only a hired hand, or even if they are yours, they belong to a larger city, county, and state. By pursuing what is good for the household and community you are in, you are pursuing your own peace. When you demonstrate good stewardship over things that are not your own, God is able to give you your own material to own. “And if you have not been faithful in what is another man’s, who will give you what is your own?” Luke 16:12). When you treat someone else’s property in a way that demonstrates your responsibility, you can be entrusted with more.You get to know God first by what others give you, and then you are able to branch out on your own and find new experiences in your relationship with God. As you blend all of your life together, you will find that your relationship with God is the unifying factor that ties all the elements of your life together.