Loose Handles

There’s a handle on my desk that has been loose for months now. I don’t open that door very often but every time I do I feel the handle wiggle a bit, and I can hear the screws on the back side hitting the wood. The sad thing is, I have a screwdriver less than 10 feet away from me that would fix it. Actually, give me a minute…

It just took me less than ten seconds to fix this handle that’s been bugging me for a long time. I could have addressed this problem many times over the past couple of months but instead I just dealt with the minor inconvenience and put off the repair. I wish I was making this story up just as an illustration but this actually happened. It took procrastinating on writing a blog for me to fix a problem that never should have gone on this long.

But how many other things do we have in our life that we are putting off because it’s inconvenient? My mind immediately goes to the dishes and trash that need to be taken care of, but it goes way beyond the menial tasks. It’s the broken relationships that need to be mended, the people who are hurting that need to be comforted, the lonely who need to be talked to. So many of the things in our life that need to be addressed deal with other people and we put it off because it almost always means admitting we were wrong or that we have to embrace the uncomfortableness of it.

But there’s also the spiritual side. We know we should pray, but we put it off because we’re too busy. We know we should read our Bibles but there’s never the time. We should volunteer or tithe but… In the words of Paul, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”.  There aren’t easy answers, but perhaps there is a first answer. Do the small things first. It took ten seconds to fix a handle and I put it off for months as it occupied entirely too much of my head space. There are small things that you can do right now, and once they are done will make it easier (though still not easy) to handle the larger things in your life.