Don't Let The Good Overshadow The Great

It's important to do things that we love. 

However, we must hold fast to the truth that in doing these things we may be pushing out the Great, the Best, the things that are meant for God. Everything we do, including our "good things" - such as enjoying our blessings - should still represent an out pour of love and appreciation for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 

I've been waking up to an app called First 5 recently. An app that allows you to set your alarm five minutes earlier each day to reflect on a bible verse or lesson from scripture and the quote below really grabbed me this morning. Recently Mr. Charming and I have made a more mental and spiritual effort to make more time in our evenings for things that connect us more to Jesus and less to things of this world.

We so often are guilty of entertaining ourselves with worldly distractions. Weekdays have looked like ys being tired from a long day of school and work, so we play on our phones or curl up with a movie and zone out after dinner.

While this doesn't seem "harmful" or "wrong", after a while you will start to feel the disconnect. From each other, from God. A hunger will creep in and an emptiness that only His word and presence can fill and everything but Him will lose it's luster. I don't know about you, but when I entertain myself with these "empty" things I feel anxious and hungry for something different, something more. It's important to stay focused on keeping your not only your relationship with God strong, but keeping true connections with your marriage and friends strong outside of technology and trivial entertainment. 

I've listed a few ways we've managed to infuse more worship and more God into our evenings together. And I'd love to hear yours. 

In what ways do you or can you intentionally swap worldly for worship in your home?

• Our pastor Mark Moore recently wrote a book titled, How To Dodge A Dragon, that breaks down Revelation in an easy to understand way. We've decided that after dinner each night we will read a chapter before turning on the television, and we've ended up reading until we fell asleep! 
  
• Bible study has started back up again, so we make it a point to pray for and talk about those sisters and brothers close to us and reflect more on what we are learning. 
• For me, I've tried to really pray on what God wants from Nosh & Nurture. He is the one who told my heart to put fingers to keyboard and tell my story, and sometimes the focus shifts, I am trying to remember that my story, my words, are for the glory of God. Not for self. Always. 
• Taking walks and really talking instead of vegging in front of the T.V. gets us to talk and connect in our marriage. 
• And lastly, we do still watch T.V. and movies, often, and we've been trying to find more faith based films to put into our rotation, making God's message part of our entertainment experience as well, similar to Christian music being the music we play in the car.