Sluff

It took my breath away this morning….coming around the corner of the duranta bush, this met my gaze and jumped in my heart!

 

Look at all the stuff sluffing off the bamboo and littering the ground. The rains have stopped and these shoots are pushing to the sky so fast you can almost sit and watch them grow!

The ground is covered with these pieces of the protective covering that they started out with…you got it, hence the “jump in my heart” part.

That’s how God does it with us, isn’t it? HE peels off the stuff we started out with, moves us from baby steps to big people steps. He knows best when it is time to take those things He has taught us and move on, encourage us to grow closer to Him and use what we know thru His teachings.

We can have the blessing of helping to sluff our own stuff, tho’! (btw, that’s sluff, not strut )

Back to sluffing… I love to recycle and re-purpose things. When I see something old and discarded, my mind goes on autopilot thinking of things to do with it. It is fun to me to take something discarded and create a new purpose for it…but sometimes, God just wants me to sluff. He wants us take those ‘bigger’ steps with Him. And oh, how my heart wants to hold on to the sluff of life when I shouldn’t!

And it has been a real season of sluffing for me. Stuff I didn’t even know was “stuff”, needs to get sluffed out of the way of my growing with God. Our human hearts will always be ruled by something. (cherry pie comes to mind here!) Anyway, you get the point…we humans are easily led, distracted and deceived and probably most of the time, we’re not even aware of it.

For some of us, it is part of growing up in ‘church’. We have all the right vocabulary and the phrases, but they do not necessarily get connected to specific action. We get confused in our reasoning about some “thing”, and because we can reason it out, then it becomes ok…in ‘church’ speak, that means justifying our behaviour.  But really, we’re only justified thru Christ, period.

Honestly, I really don’t like that there is such a thing as eating too much cherry pie, but there is AND as it turns out, it is better for me not to eat cherry pie every single day of my life. God does give us choices tho’! We can dive into the pie or, we sluff on! Let’s litter the ground together.

God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.

Ephesians 4:15 & 16