Looking Forward?

          So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.  But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen. (II Peter 3:14-18)

A few weeks ago, we were told that some senators were coming to visit the garden center. We cleaned windows, floors, bathrooms, under the register desks, and wherever dust might settle. I pointed out the unlikelihood that the senators would inspect the employee’s restroom and was told, “Ya never know.” That's true enough, but it irritated me a little that we clean like our lives depend on impressing some politician, but we don’t make half that effort for general customers.

I can’t really blame us. This is human nature. There are people we want to believe the best of us, and others we figure won’t notice or care. Scientists did a study involving lighting levels and productivity in a factory. They increased the lighting. Productivity picked up. They reduced it, and if anything, productivity rose again. After a while, they realized that the lighting didn’t influence productivity. The fact that the workers were being observed (specifically about productivity) produced the effect.

And when you receive word that someone whose opinion matters to you is going to visit, chances are good that you’ll at least give the place “a lick and a promise.”  At the very least, you will put things out of sight that might cause unpleasantness.

I can’t say that this sense of urgency pervades my daily life. Urgency, yes - everything is urgent! But Christ’s return? Improving moral excellence? Getting it all right? Those tend to fall into the daily failure category. Those things might get squeezed in between all the other things, but I don’t notice people declining invitations or appointments, or making sure all their bills are paid because Jesus might return today.

This is not a suggestion that we do that sort of thing. It’s more of a question of what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to do it. And the key may be in the fact that while being spotless, blameless, and at peace with Him definitely influences what we do and the choices we make, it also includes how we do the things we do. In fact, the how we do what we do may be more important than what we do, partly because how we do things directly involves the choices of what to do. We may not have time to take a couple of hours out of our days to meditate on something, but we can generally attempt to treat the next person we encounter better than we did the person with whom we just struggled. And as those attempts become a habit, aren’t we doing what Peter advised us to do?