What do YOU crave?

I love love L-O-V-E my new way of life. It's still a lot of work to stay on top of all the little messes that happen every 10 seconds with the kids, but yesterday morning I saw my grandparents walking up our driveway, and I was really disappointed they didn't come inside...they were just coming to borrow the wheelbarrow under our deck. I would've loved to have my clean, orderly grandmother catch me unexpectedly with a clean, orderly living space. Wednesdays are usually my worst housekeeping days, because My Hero is home. I usually slip into vacation mode when he has a day off, though I've been working on retraining myself not to think that way. My job is much the same on his days off...the kids are still here, after all. So yesterday I kept up with the discipline of cleaning up after myself constantly, and kept the kids doing the same, and My Hero reinforced it and helped follow through with it, and we didn't have a crisis in the evening getting ready to hold group at our place.
Then we talked about discipline at our small group last night. Nowadays the word is more inspiring to me than ever...it's like Dave Ramsey explained on his radio show once, when someone asked him how he was able to make himself be disciplined. He answered that first you get to the place where enough is enough, you get "sick and tired of being sick and tired." You have to get mad enough about your circumstances to change them. Then once you're there, and you start seeing the benefits, it's easier to keep going. Then once you've tasted the success of discipline in one or two areas of life, you start to believe in it. I remember when I was trying to get myself to cut back on sugar, I felt like giving up my habit of sitting down with a stack of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk for dipping in the evenings as I watched a movie or read a book was too cruel. Months later, after giving it up and seeing the weight drop it doesn't feel like much of a sacrifice, but until you let go...it feels like unnecessary deprivation (how much difference does one little stack of cookies make, anyway? My wii fit lets me know how much each little indulgence matters (2 lbs?? really?? for one bowl of ice cream?))
We usually start our small group discussions with a couple of fun "ice breaker" questions, and one of the ones My Hero came up with for last night was, "What kind of addiction do you have?" He meant funny things, not intervention-type confessions, and most of them were... Mt. Dew, coffee, yardsaling for antiques to sell on e-bay, mine was sugar... Then he went from there to the chapter we read for the week, I Peter 2, and pointed us to verse 2, "You must crave pure spiritual milk so that you can grow into the fullness of your salvation." The discussion led us to the conclusion that we crave God's Word when we form the habit of being in it consistently and depending on it daily...it's hard to establish, but once the habit is formed, we realize what a difference it makes in our lives and there's no going back. Like any good habit, we get addicted to the good results.
Here's to another day of striving for the good result of a clean house all day long.