Hmmm....are we sluggards?

Well I guess everyone is at some point and time! But this is the phrase Chris and I have been slinging around all day after our second week at Chestnut Ridge.

This was week two of the series on the seven deadly sins.....sin of the day was sloth. (AKA, being a sluggard!) Now, last week was pride. As a musician and a performer, pride is always something that I struggle with. God has a pretty clear way of dealing with that though! Every time Chris and I would start thinking we were hot stuff, just a little something would come up to remind us who the real achiever really is! Just enough to make us go "Oh, whoops, you're right. I'm not all that great, but You certainly are! The other half of pride is a little more difficult for me to struggle with (the "I can't do that, I'm no good" part...it's equally as self-centered as the "look how good I am" pride). I do have a problem with that, and usually I'm overly critical of myself. At least I think so. Chris always seems happy (musically) with what we do, and I hope he'd be honest if it wasn't good. But anyway, talk about pride to a musician, that's a given. I don't know many musicians who don't struggle with pride at one time or another!

So back to sloth. Right after music there was a dramatic reading...just kind of about what you think of when you think of sloth. Fat, smelly, lazy guy. Whew, that's not me! Off the hook on that one! Then the pastor come up and talks about how we have all these distractions....and to dwell on them when there are other things that NEED done (umm, like posting on BabyCenter instead of cleaning the kitchen) is slovenly. Okay, so maybe I'm not off the hook.

There were lots of other good points made.....like how work is not a bad thing. It's often said that work is God's punishment after the fall, but in fact he put us on the earth to work (though maybe we toil a little more now) and through hard work we receive fulfillment.....of one kind or another. And the punishments of laziness kind of snowball into a big thing you'd rather not deal with....if you'd just gotten up and done a little bit of work in the first place you would have saved yourself a lot of work in the end.

All in all, a great sermon.....both Chris and I came away with it feeling pushed to be less sluggardly and slothful this week. Plus we have a new word......sluggard. Say it, it's fun.....sluggard, sluggard. I even like "sluggardly" (though my spell checker does not, so I'm guessing it's not a real word. Must stop being so sluggardly and call someone about making it one!)