Monday night is trash night in our neighborhood, and for the past couple of years I have been taking out my elderly neighbors trash next door and two doors down. The first home (two doors down) is an 82-year-old man. Because I visit him daily, my stop with him is very quick and efficient – say hi, ask about his day, and take the trash out. I am usually in and out in three minutes.
However, my neighbor next door is an 88-year-old French woman who lives alone. I try to visit her a couple of times a week. This means when I do drop in for trash night, she is ready to spend some quality time. A 5 minute task turns into a large conversation and a 30-45 minute visit that I have come to appreciate that I get the opportunity to sacrifice my time for her.
A specific custom that we have developed over the past year is a Monday night cleaning out of her fridge. As I stand next to her holding a trash bag, she goes meticulously through the fridge evaluating items that have been there for varying amounts of time. Some items she deems as good and keeps, some she deems trash, and others she offers to me, which is an act of love on her part.
However one day when we were cleaning out the fridge, I noticed she had a sour cream container that was six months expired. I pointed it out and opened it to show her the contents. Truthfully, it did not look too bad. But there was some minor curdling and a hint of an expired smell. I told her that I would throw it away. She stopped me. She said it didn’t look too bad, and she told me that she would know if it was expired by smell and taste test the next time she used it. For now, I was to put it back into the fridge. I complied, knowing that there would be bad digestion repercussions for anyone who consumed a legitimate serving of that sour cream. But it was her fridge, and I trusted when the time would come, she would make the right decision.
It struck me later on that this small interaction is an analogy for the spiritual life. The journey of a Christian is to conform our heart to receive the love of God, and to love what He loves. This means that throughout our life, we will need to evaluate our hearts (with the aid of the Holy Spirit) and identify the loves that are good for us, and the loves that are bad for us (as we do with food in my neighbor’s fridge). God nudges our hearts to identify things that should be thrown out because it no longer will serve our spiritual healthiness. However, it often happens that we are not able to throw some things away just yet because of an unhealthy lack of trust in God and/or attachment to the unhealthy love. We ignore the warnings. We keep the love in our hearts assuring God and ourselves that we will know if it is truly good once we dabble in it once more. We may be correct or we may be incorrect. Regardless, this often leads to near occasions of sin, and while we may ultimately come to the right decision to remove the love from our hearts, we could have saved ourselves much of the extra work and discernment if we had just listened to God and gotten rid of the misplaced love.
While it is good to reflect on our reactions to God’s promptings, it is also good to notice how God reacts as well. In the scenario of the fridge, I allowed my neighbor to keep the sour cream because I trusted that as an 88-year-old woman, she would be able to recognize bad sour cream when it came to garnishing her food. And in the off chance that she did not heed the warning signs, I was prepared to take her to the hospital. God often does the same with us. As we grow in the spiritual life, He prompts us to remove things in our hearts that no longer serve our deepening prayer life (either sinful or not sinful). Yet, He wants us to willingly give these things to Him because He has called us servants no longer, but friends. He knows that a willingness to trust Him comes from our freedom of choice to His will. The only time that He steps in and enforces His will is either to miraculously save us (we do not know why or when He chooses to do this) or to come to our aid when we know we are not strong enough to surpass a temptation and we call on Him.
The takeaway from all of this is that we need to be attentive to the things that we keep in the fridge of our hearts, listening to the will of God through the promptings of the Holy Spirit. But also to know that God is giving us the choice to act in freedom because we have not been given a spirit of slavery in which we fall into fear, but a spirit of adoption through which we cry our “Abba” (Father). God is always extending the invitation to grow closer to him. We just need to ask Him for the trust to follow Him.
