Maintenance Danger

I hate maintenance. Genuinely, I hate it. I love fixing broken things, or even making something from scratch, but maintenance; hate it. True maintenance is a necessary evil. If you properly maintain your car then the odds of you needing to repair something are greatly reduced. But spending money on an oil change sometimes bugs me. I know it needs to be done, because everybody says that it does, but my car runs fine even if I’m late with my maintenance. I know it needs it, but there are no red flags telling me that I genuinely need to do it. Of course, if there were red flags then it wouldn’t need maintenance; it would be in need of repair.
Our lives need maintenance too, but I hate that as well. I think most of our lives our spent purely on maintaining what we have. We get to a certain point in life, or we accomplish a certain status or level of living and then we shut down the afterburners and begin to maintain what we have.
We here constantly about maintaining a healthy diet, or maintaining a healthy exercise regime. What about maintaining a healthy spiritual discipline like bible-reading or prayer? We hear those preached too. These are all true and extremely important to not only maintain a healthy body, but a healthy spiritual life as well. I hate the routine. I do it, but nobody said I had to like it.
I don’t want to be a maintainer. A maintainer is someone who has accepted the status quo, or has simply accepted average. What would happen if we decided that average is not good enough? Not good enough for us, not good enough for our children, not good enough for our county or not even good enough for our presidential candidates?
Have you ever wondered what your life would be like today if you had taken advantage of that business opportunity several years ago? Or where would you be living now if you had opted for the riskier career?
Back in the late sixties one of my family members had the opportunity to buy a McDonald’s franchise for next-to-nothing. He turned the deal down because it was too risky. That McDonald’s is still doing business on the same corner 40 years later, and my family member is still bemoaning his ‘safe’ decision.
In our spiritual lives maintenance becomes par for the course. It has become far too accepted to merely exist. Even as a pastor, if I am not careful, I can slip into a maintenance mode instead of advancing the Kingdom of God. Pastor Craig Groshel said, “At one point, I had become a full time pastor and a part time Christian.”
There has to be more to our spiritual lives. There is more to the relationship that we hold with God, but first we must decide that maintaining is no longer acceptable. To push forward, past the line of mediocrity, we must have a willingness to get out of our self-imposed comfort zones, and into a new realm with new problems, new challenges, and new rewards. It’s not always the easiest way, but it is always the most rewarding. Not just rewarding for us, but also for all of those that follow the trails we blaze into uncharted territory.