Zeal For Your House Consumes Me

Zeal for your house consumes me

I believe that waiting is good exercise,

And that patience is born of delay.

Waiting is good exercise unless it spoils and rots through bitterness.

It is good exercise unless the trust we earlier spoke, and the faith we professed

Were by our own hidden conditions limited to the good times,

Or constrained to our own finite understanding.

God has been teaching me what it means to wait patiently, to living patiently.

This is called temperance, and characterized by trust and self-control.

Denial of self, the putting aside of even good desires

For His greater purpose ––– this I have been learning.

Zeal for your house consumes me –––––

The truth is, not every person we meet comes to serve us.

Not every person we meet is there to date us.

Our wealth is not only for our pleasure.

The trials come bring more than pain and sorrow.

God has a larger purpose in all things.

Though the immediate and apparent may include us,

We exist in one scene, in one act, in a much larger play.

Zeal for your house consumes me –––––

I have come to this conclusion…

It is the height of arrogance and self-centeredness

To see everything simply by how it effects me,

To measure each trial only by its impact on me,

To judge each friendship by its benefit to me,

To worship God only when His performance pleases me.

It is the height of arrogance and self-centeredness

To clap only when He has successfully made me laugh,

To cheer only when his newest miracle is better than the last,

And to call sacrifice the giving of that which costs me nothing.

Zeal for your house consumes me –––––

I have tempered the desire to please myself.

I am moving towards the point where my first thought will no longer simply ME.

Zeal for your house consumes me –––––

Have I learned this lesson? Not quite yet.

But from the foot of this mountain called righteousness,

Having seen its crest, having gazed at its peak,

I begin my journey upward, hoping soon to be home.