Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
Colossians 3:2 (NIV)
Where Your Life Is Kept
The coin laundry on the corner stays open all night, and at midnight there are usually two people in it. One of them is a woman with a rolling basket of sheets. She washes them here because her own machine ties up a whole afternoon, and she’d rather lose the sleep than the afternoon. The sheets belong to a bed eleven blocks away, and she has the whole row of washers to herself.
The Colossians had already died. Their life is hidden with Christ in God, held somewhere they can’t reach and can’t lose, and Christ is there as well, seated at God’s right hand. Paul points their thinking at that place when he tells them to set their minds on things above. They are being sent to the one spot where their own life is kept.
A person who isn’t in the room can take up a whole evening, and the thinking goes there without being sent. Paul asks for that much attention, pointed at Christ, who has your life in his keeping and hasn’t set it down anywhere. Your hands can stay exactly where they are, and so can the rest of you.
The dryers take quarters, and the one on the end runs hotter than the rest. “That one’s fast,” says the man waiting on his own load, “if you don’t mind the noise.” She feeds it eight quarters and stands with her arms folded while it bangs through the first few minutes, watching the sheets come around and go past.
Partway through the cycle she opens the door, pulls the sheets out warm and a little damp, and folds them that way on the table by the window. Then she carries the basket out into the night, to have them on the bed before she sleeps.
A Prayer to Remember
You put my life where I can’t lose it, God, and you did that before I knew enough to ask for it. Turn my thinking that way today, in the middle of everything down here that wants deciding. You have the better half of my life already, so make me interested in it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
