I am blessed to own a hot tub. Every year in May, I empty it, and then I scrub it out and refill it the next day. This year, I emptied it but waited a couple of weeks to clean and refill it. Big mistake.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I armed myself with rags, wipes, sponges, bleach water, buckets, a hose, and filter cleaner. I was a bit nervous to view beneath the lid as I knew that I would see puddles of old, standing water in the various floor compartments. I was also afraid of what else I might find.<\/p>\n
Warning:<\/span><\/b> Gross Alert<\/b>\u2014what follows may disgust more squeamish readers.<\/b><\/p>\n Yep; half a dozen roaches and\u2014EWWW\u2014a dozen or more garden slugs lounged in placid contentment within the empty tub. I had to face off with each individual, nasty critter, and in my plastic gloves, I defeated the\u00a0disgust-oids and rid the hot tub of its alien invaders.<\/p>\n Then the painstakingly tough work began. I had to carefully sanitize each square inch of the tub and under the cover. What normally takes much less than an hour took several hours.<\/p>\n The good news is that it is clean and free of creepy crawlies and contaminants. The lesson learned here is that I should have cleaned the tub as soon as it was emptied.<\/p>\n This raises the question about spiritual maintenance. When God directs you to deal with an issue in your life, do you procrastinate? Do you engage in a quick \u201cgood confession\u201d, figuring that will\u00a0hold it until you can deal with it later\u2026and later\u2026and later? I have, and unfortunately, these things can snowball, even to the point of\u2014like my empty hot tub\u2014attracting unwanted \u201croaches\u201d and \u201cslugs\u201d.<\/p>\n In Chapter 6 of First of All, Pray<\/i>, I wrote about the importance of dealing immediately with those things that God is targeting in your life\u2014those things that only serve to hinder your effectiveness in prayer. If you put it off, the \u201ccontaminants\u201d multiply. Here’s the excerpt:<\/p>\n \u201cCould it be that the Lord has been speaking to you about an indiscretion, attitude, comment, or even a seemingly minor behavior in your life that you just haven\u2019t gotten around to correcting? Don\u2019t postpone dealing with the area which God is targeting. Why spend one more night, as Pharaoh chose to do so long ago, with the \u201cfrogs\u201d taking up residence in your life? (See Exodus 8:8-10.) The Holy Spirit, who is kind enough to reveal these things to you (see Romans 2:4) is also powerful enough, with your cooperation, to free you from all of them as well! You <\/i>repent; He <\/i>provides the power to change!\u201d (Excerpt taken\u00a0from page 88; First of All, Pray: Prescription for a Nation in Crisis;\u00a0<\/em>\u00a9 2013\u2013Dorothy Frick)<\/p>\n Such quick-to-act, tenderness of conscience has a huge impact on your\u00a0prayer-effectiveness. May you be a better steward of your spiritual life than I was of my hot tub; it will surely spare you both headaches and heartbreak\u2014and the ewww<\/i>-factor!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dorothy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am blessed to own a hot tub. Every year in May, I empty it, and then I scrub it out and refill it the next day. This year, I emptied it but waited a couple of weeks to clean and refill it. Big mistake. Yesterday I armed myself with rags, wipes, sponges, bleach water, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-june2013","category-timelyexcerpts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}