Masters Ready!

If you live in Augusta, Georgia, home of the most famous of all golf tournaments, then you know that our community gets in a happy tizzy preparing for the world to come and visit early each April.  The road crews pack up any repair efforts to make room for the coming traffic, businesses spit shine their faces, grass that may go untended the rest of the year gets manicured, and the azaleas and dogwoods even cooperate by adding to the decorations of our town. 

So many homeowners prepare their houses to be occupied by guests from around the country and the world, because there could never be enough hotel rooms to accommodate the patrons of the Masters Golf Tournament.  Locals get a little crazy in their preparations…houses are pressure washed, multiple guest linens are purchased, drawers are emptied, and each home is perfected to be the very best we can offer for the folks who will call us ‘home’ during our seven days of fame. I even know of families, having completed preparations in various bedrooms, sleeping on the floors of their own homes so the preparations are not disturbed before guests arrive. That one cracked me up!

True confessions, I have never made the effort to make my home meet the high standards required to be rented.  Call me lazy (I prefer to think of myself as ‘otherwise occupied’) but I don’t gut my closets and touch up my paint and have my carpets cleaned for Masters Week.  I do, though, organize more, purchase food to prepare, and get ready for family and friends who may come and stay during the week.  We have even sheltered another family who was renting their home.   So though I may not go off the deep end, I, too, make Masters Week preparations.

As I look around my ‘ready for Masters’ home, serenaded by the dishwasher that will need emptying yet again, I think about all the activity to get us ready, and all the activity around us in other homes to get ready for the week.

And it strikes me that, I want to offer much more effort to keep my heart prepared to accommodate my Savior, my Master, every evening when I lie down and every morning when I get up, and all the hours between. Please make me Master Ready in all of my ways!

Search me, O God, and know my heart!  Try me and know my thoughts! Psalm 139:23