Watch Your Waistline

Proverbs 13
4 The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,
But the soul of the diligent is made fat.

There was a time when I couldn’t gain weight. I ate what I wanted, but I was so skinny I thought that I had to try to gain weight. When I was 17ish, in addition to whatever huge dinner mom fixed, I’d eat a Dairy Queen double cheeseburger, large fry, with a glass of milk at 9pm to gain some weight. I made it up to a whopping 150lbs by the time I graduated high school. Those were the days. Now, if I even look at a cookie, I have to let my belt out a notch.

Yesterday, I talked about being fast, and the need to slow down. One of the reasons why I need to slow down, in addition to actually giving thought to my words, is that I can’t be diligent and fast. Maybe some folks can, but I’m not that good. I can do fast, or I can be diligent, but I can’t do both.

Being diligent requires a certain amount of care and thoughtfulness. Being diligent requires intentionality. Diligence isn’t sloppy, it doesn’t throw things together, it doesn’t cut corners, it doesn’t give a half hearted attempt. Diligence is acting as if everything you do is truly for the Lord and not for men: whether you’re at home or at work.

Diligence is hard. The attention to detail it requires uses up a good deal more effort and brainpower than just completing a task and checking it off a list. In this verse, we see that something amazing happens through diligence. Diligence puts meat on our spiritual bones. Diligently being about the work of the Father, keeps our spirits well fed. The alternative sounds pretty hungry. Craving and getting nothing reminds me of a tale Jesus told.

There was a young man who left the house of his father and went to a foreign land. After coming to ruin, he worked feeding pigs. The pigs ate, but the young man had nothing. He craved the slop that pigs ate, as he had nothing to eat. But then he remembered how it was in his father’s house. How everyone was well fed and cared for, and he determined to go back there.

I want to get as close to God as I can. I want my soul to be well fed. I want to have a “That’s a healthy boy!” sized soul instead of a scrawny, starving for any kind of trash that comes along soul. For that, I need to be diligent. Watch your waistline.