Today’s passage is Malachi 2:1-9. Because his priests do not obey his commandment to honor and glorify his name as Levi did, the Lord has cursed them and their descendants. Priests are supposed to keep and teach the law, but they don’t.
Why do the priests’ descendants share in the punishment?
Why have the priests ceased to honor God?
“Because you do not take it to heart”(2)
Taking myself and my work seriously has been a lifelong struggle.
I always want to give up and do something else, lose myself in forgetting, rationalizing my distraction from anything serious.
My struggle with today’s passage was symptomatic of my larger and ongoing struggle.
I don’t take my life to heart. I don’t think I ever have.
Having my teenage daughter here has helped show me that.
Because she never lived with me but only saw me for short weeks each summer, she finds herself repeatedly surprised at things I’ve done, skills I have that she didn’t know about.
She didn’t know about my hitchhiking around Europe just after I graduated from high school.
She didn’t know I am a taekwondo black belt or that I know judo.
She didn’t know about my trips to Spain.
She didn’t know things about my family history.
In telling her and answering her questions, I’m unintentionally reflecting on the life I lived.
More and more I see a life that I did not take to heart.
Most of what I have done has had no purpose.
Although my parents encouraged me to try new things in their efforts to broaden my horizons partly because they never had those opportunities, they allowed me to quit whenever I didn’t like something or it reached the point where I would have to find a deeper level of commitment and perseverance.
In the freedom they gave me to choose, I always chose the easy way out.
The fault is mine, not theirs.
I coasted on ability and just a smidgen of effort.
I didn’t show the grit and self-control that are the hallmarks of a life taken to heart.
I didn’t set goals, make the plans to achieve them, and stay focused until I achieved them.
Instead of taking things to heart, I chose to daydream and chase a fantasy life.
I didn’t take my studies to heart, I didn’t take my parents to heart,
I didn’t take my first marriage to heart, I didn’t take my children to heart.
I didn’t do any of that because I wanted things to be nice and I wanted them to be easy.
I am like the steward who took his one talent given by God, buried it, and turned to other things.
My day of reckoning worries me.
I am like the priests in today’s passage because the refuse of my squandered life is smeared across my face.
My sins are ever before me.
I praise God for Malachi’s message and the arrival of my daughter because there is still time to take my life to heart, to take God’s call of salvation to heart, to see my sins and repent, to seek God’s will and trust in his hand.
Application: to take my marriage and my job to heart and prayerfully make the goals and plans for them as inspired by God and confirmed by his word and spiritual community.
Lord, let me take my life to heart and help me resist the desire to quit and rationalize yet another change in direction, another sin of selfishness.
