Yesterday Father Tim, a friend and adviser, gave me the following story adapted from “A House with Four Rooms” by Rumer Godden.
A house with four rooms
Imagine a house with four rooms:
One room is a fully equipped kitchen, stocked with every kind of delicious food and wine.
Another room is a quiet library, furnished with comfortable chairs and lined with shelves of the best books written.
A third room is a work room or studio. It houses a work shop for carpentry, a garage for automotive maintenance, or a studio for painting, pottery or sculpting.
The forth room is a high tech media room, with the latest in audio-video hardware and a state of the art computer set-up.
You become so interested in one of the rooms that it becomes the room you live in: you become so immersed in cooking that you never avail yourself of the treasures of the library; or you become so engrossed with all the toys in the media room that you never sit down and enjoy dinner with you family; or you become so immersed in projects and gadgetry that you forget how to connect with other human beings. Our lives are houses with many rooms. Yet we tend to live in only one room: whatever room we find most comfortable and safe, whatever room is most fun and satisfying, whatever room is least stressful and demanding.
There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone of us is a house with four rooms – a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual room. And most of us tend to live most of the time in one of those rooms. Unless less we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired out, we are incomplete.
There are lots of stories out there that hit on the mission of Public Safety Ministries. As I spread the message, people see the Spiritual Fitness idea and share it with me. One of my goals with this website is pass those sightings along to others. So enjoy and feel free to contact me with your Spiritual Fitness sightings and I’d be happy to pass them on
