You know when you find yourself in it.

You feel it, couch conversations with spouse quickly transition from community and fellowship, prayer priorities to the ongoing family business, pending payments here, recent bills there, who’s using the car tomorrow? that email, who to call today.

Well,

And if you are seeking for work, like I am of late, past time meditations are oriented around the next prospect, an application that needs to go, a possibility to get this client. Who inboxed? We need to get, we need, we need, we need.

Sigh!

Sometimes preservation becomes preoccupation, maintaining the estate, raising better kids, deciding on better schools.

For singles, preservation for a largely unknown future can look like angling for a next romantic relationship, chasing years of unreflected scholarship and the like.

It almost never runs out, what starts as a youthful longing for a godly spouse in your twenties can morph into an annual preoccupation with secondary things, that quickly suffocates spiritual ambition and vitality.

I call them secondary things, because what often suffers in these pursuits is the attention to the things God cares about.

Sure, estates are worth leaving for our families, wise investments are biblical, so are good jobs and transcripts (and take my word too on this, spouses are worth partnering with)

Problem is, for every person who rightly pursues God’s heart in stewarding things, you find tens of us ensnared by the cares of this life, single and married.

Midlife has a way of naturally reorienting us, not necessarily to the fleeting nature of life, but to the seeming fullness of it, at eternity’s expense.

But what runs dry when our waking lives are guided by the wallet, more than the word? Where are we headed if the material constantly overtakes the spiritual? quick answer – we become worldly.

The author of Hebrews 2, in exalting Jesus, connects inattention to him to spiritual drifting, we settle for peripherals, we join the infamous rat race.

We, well…

I recently read in Haggai 1:4 how God’s people abandoned his temple project and settled for “paneled houses” as his house “lay in ruins.”

Far removed we are from Haggai’s context, seeing Jesus fulfills physical temple realities, yet so close we are to their condition, because so much in our schedule is rarely oriented around “seeking first the kingdom of God.” (Matt 6:33)

A lot of our spiritual estate lies in ruins, as we spend hours seeking to squeeze most out of the world, rather than the word —for his church, for his kingdom.

I recently found these lines from the Valley of Vision Puritan prayers specifically helpful.

“May I remember the dignity of my spiritual release
Never too busy to attend to my soul
never too engrossed with time
that I neglect the things of eternity
Thus, may I not only live, but grow towards thee. “