A Word About, … Niggling
My wife loves to decorate our home with clocks and watches of all sorts and descriptions. In fact, one entire wall of our home is nearly covered with clocks of various sizes and shapes. We have one mantle clock that doesn’t seem to know what time it is when it chimes. It either doesn’t know how to tell time, or it doesn’t know how to count. Either way, the result is the same: It doesn’t chime-out the correct time. When it’s five o’clock, its face and hands show five pm. But it’s voice chimes out 8 gongs. It’s three-hours off, when it comes to pealing the correct time.
Well, last night, I’m was lying in bed, and I rolled over at just before 1 am. and my mind remembered some people I had promised to pray for. God, of course, never sleeps or slumbers, and I knew he’d be up at that hour, so I began to talk to him about those people I had promised to pray for. I was only a few sentences into my prayer when that clock started to chime … it played that little Westminster song it always plays, and then — all it would have needed to do was gong one time, to alert me to the fact that it’s one a.m. and then hush. But after it played the Westminster tune, it didn’t stop with one gong. It gonged again. And again. And again. I know it did, because I counted off, in my head, how many times it chimed, right in the middle of my conversation with God.
And that is a perfect example of what I call a niggling annoyance.
The dictionary says that niggling is anything that causes slight but persistent annoyance, discomfort or anxiety. But I think John Wesley might call niggling ‘worldliness.’ I read a quote not too long ago that was attributed to him that said, “Worldliness is anything that cools my affection for God.” Quite honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a clock in our house as something ‘worldly.’ But that clock that doesn’t know how to count? Well, I guess you could say it ‘niggled me’ right out of a conversation — an important conversation I was having with God about some people I had promised to pray for.
I need a lot of help with niggling in my life. Some of the annoyances that cool my affection for God are a result of my own neglect. (I could stop the clock for a few hours, and then start it again. But that would be too easy. I’d rather just be annoyed.) Some niggling is out of my control. My niggling back ache persists! This world is filled with those slight, persistent annoyances that can interrupt my thought life, my prayer life. Doesn’t take much to throw me off, send me into a state of aggravation and frustration.
My only hope in dealing with my persistent, niggling challenge? It is the wonderful truth: In the world, I will for a certainty have ‘niggling.’ But I will be of good cheer. Jesus has overcome my niggles. I love his prayer for his disciples, in John 17: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15, NIV)
May the Lord protect me from the niggles that would cool my affection for God.
