Watch with me

So, my dear friends, listen carefully; those who embrace these my ways are most blessed. Mark a life of discipline and live wisely; don’t squander your precious life. Blessed the man, blessed the woman, who listens to me, awake and ready for me each morning, alert and responsive as I start my day’s work. When you find me, you find life, real life, to say nothing of God’s good pleasure. But if you wrong me, you damage your very soul; when you reject me, you’re flirting with death. (Proverbs 8:32-36)

Having a "storehouse" gives us the ability to "save up" for the days of leanness that are sure to come. God's storehouse has resources always available for us: Direction; Strength; Success; and Insight. We can access his storehouse at any time - making the necessary withdrawals. It is also important to lay up for times of leanness in our own lives - things like Trust, Patience, Endurance, and even Faith. The blessings God distributes to his children are also things we need to "tuck away" in our storehouses: Unending Riches such as wealth, honor, justice, and emotional wholeness. Sometimes we only think of wealth in the sense of what we have in our bank accounts and investments - God thinks of wealth as what we possess in the way of relationships! Gaining the right perspective on what he prepares for us as "items" which "fill our storehouses" will help us to embrace them as they are provided.

Those who have full storehouses possess the ability to remain watchful. They are constantly on the lookout for what will best "fill" the storehouse. Following Christ involves watchfulness. It is easy to miss what can "fill" you like nothing else ever will - just because you are neither watching "for" nor "after" what you have been given. One is expectation - the other is nurturing. We expect, so we watch "for". We want to preserve and have at the ready, so we watch "after" what we have been entrusted with until it is nurtured into something of full value in our lives.

The concept of "watching after" what we are given in life is foreign to many. We live in a world of disposable everything - even relationships. The first relationship to watch over is the one we have with our Creator and Lord, Jesus Christ. If there is insufficient attention paid toward maintaining this one, all the others we work on maintaining will pale in comparison. The thing which keeps relationships strong is the willingness to nurture them. Nurturing requires some investment on the part of the individual within the relationship. Nurturing involves feeding - we have to "feed" any relationship. When we don't "feed" our bodies, what happens? We run down, don't think very clearly, and soon we begin to burn muscle / fat - reserves we have stored up against a "future day". The same is true in relationship - when we don't regularly "feed" it, we burn through the "reserves" we have built up within it! Just sayin!