DUST IN THE ATTIC

The attic is the one place I think in a house that is often neglected. That is providing you even live somewhere that has an attic.

Spiritually, to me the attic of the soul is that place where we store our hopes and dreams. It is like a place where one puts away the holiday decorations till next year. Only with our hopes and dreams we do have a tendency to separate out the ones that are possible from the ones that are pure fantasy. I doubt I need to define the difference.

The ones that are pure fantasy are better kept stored in the attic that put on display since we may or may not want to display them for others. But it doesn’t keep us from having them.

What often helps is to be able to embrace the desires that fuel such dreams and hopes. For the “paper” we wrap them in comes often from our heart. And we don’t always enjoy facing the fact that there is hate or corruption so close to the essence of our being.

Yet God knows. And until we know we often never comes as close to appreciating the need his grace or forgiveness.

When that paper gets used too much and we do it with such a second natured behavior we can often totally blur what is real in our heart from what is fantasy. Slowly and irrevocably we can easily slip into turning some area of our life into a microcosm of our attic. It can be all wrapped up in the colorful paper of our illusions and never force us to see what is underneath. Basically it becomes a lie. One that we never have to face as reality.

In a house of worship thus we can cling to some dream of being a very righteous person. But since we are sinners, we wrap that dream in the paper of lies. Oh we never say they are lies, we just learn by acting a certain way NOT to have to admit that it is after all just an act. And when our play acting achieves it success, well we become what we think is our dream fulfilled and never worry about facing the fact of it all being based on some fantasy.

This is a game I’ve played myself. And the sad thing is when people honestly think it works. What is more scary is when they think God doesn’t know the difference.

Dust of stagnation and a lack of spiritual growth occurs as long as we continue to play that role and act out the dream as if it were real. Such dust will eventually blind us completely to the truth about lives. Then slowly, ever so slowly we lose our grasp upon being able to truly hear God tapping us on the shoulder by the power of his holy spirit and trying to get our attention. We are just having such a good time pretending that our little spiritual fantasies are somehow the same as truth. For some it works that way for years. Which is a true tragedy because as long as we let the dust collect, we shall never see what is really there.