Inventory

Over the past week or two, the parts department at FMS has been preparing for an audit. One aspect of the preparations is counting and verifying inventory. The parts room is lined with shelves that are stacked with boxes that are filled with parts, and each of those many thousands of parts has to be counted.

The boxes were all dusty and some even had dead bugs and spiderwebs in them - evidence that no one had needed that exact part in many months, or maybe even years. The tiny star-shaped lock washers that were almost too small to be able to pinch between your fingers and the bags and bags full of rivets were probably the hardest items to count accurately. It was simple to count fuel sending units and seatbelts because of their size, but the nuts, screws, and washers were an entirely different matter. 

One screw, two screw, there screw, four.... My mind began wondering what analogy could be drawn between counting airplane parts and our lives as followers of Jesus Christ. I suppose we need to be sure to audit ourselves from time to time and see what inventory we have in our lives. Have we counted our blessings today? That's usually a cheerful way to start out - by looking at the good things God has blessed us with and being thankful. How many of the nine fruits of the spirit that Galatians 5 talks about do we have evident in our daily walk with The Lord? Try counting those for yourself. If we count the numbers if sins we committed, the number of mistakes we made, or the number of times we failed today, that may be a depressing part of our spiritual inventory, but it is still important. Counting sins isn't important because the number itself matters. It's important to identify different forms of sin in our lives and hearts so that we can fight against them and try to clean them out of our parts room completely. 

One of the difficult things about taking inventory during the middle of a busy workday was all of the noise and commotion going on all around you. Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight... Then someone would bust through the door and call your name. Like a flash, that last number you had counted vanished from your mind, and you had to start all over. Life is full of distractions too, and these tend to pull us away from the duties and responsibilities we need to concentrate on as Christians. In the middle of going through your prayer list, someone suddenly calls you and needs your help, pronto! After a few steady weeks of daily Bible reading you contract a bad illness, and in a matter of days, the good habit gets broken and thrown out the window. It happens. Sometimes  we just have to start again and not lose heart. 

Look at the bright side, at least we don't have to count the hairs on our head or the stars in the sky - God has those numbered already! 

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! (2 Corinthians 13:5 ESV)