Despite the lingering snow, I knew spring was truly here when I felt compelled last week to clean out bureau drawers and closets and even our family minivan. I am not a fantastic cleaner, but I do like to keep things organized. The van, however, had truly gotten away from my husband and me. It seems all those pocket crannies and cup holders were engineered to hold blackened banana peels, empty drink containers and kids’ garbage.

So I marched down the driveway in mud boots one night after dinner to tackle the van. Imagine my horror when from the console between the front seats I pulled out a broken glass thermometer. The kind with a red line up the side. The kind that looked like it had mercury.

I’d found it in a cupboard during our recent move and meant to take it to the hardware store where I’d seen a flier for a campaign offering to exchange people’s toxic old thermometers for a reward. Only I’d forgotten. And somehow this one had ended up in our van.

I will not pretend that I handled this discovery gracefully. Believing we’d been driving our children around with this health hazard all winter, I threw away the broken glass vial, bellowed at my husband (as if it were his fault) and stomped up the road to quiet my raging soul.

Like most things, ignoring that seemingly perilous thermometer didn’t matter – until the day it did. Medical science tells us that many of our negative health choices – such as being sedentary or eating the wrong kind of foods – don’t reveal physical harm until we are over the age of 40. Then, seemingly overnight, our years of poor choices manifest as diabetes, high blood pressure and other ailments. Like my mislaid thermometer, our small daily choices don’t seem to matter until the day they do.

As I walked up the road that evening, I realized that our spiritual choices are often the same. It’s easy to delay facing life’s divine decisions — why I am here, who I am answerable to, how to prepare for eternity – believing that what I do today doesn’t really matter. But one day it will.

“For we must all stand before Christ to be judged,” says 2 Corinthians 5:10 (NLT). “We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”

How I spend my time. How I spend my money. And how I respond to Christ. Far greater than the peril of a broken thermometer — which, when we did a little research turned out not to have mercury after all — is the danger of delaying decisions of eternal consequence.

Thankfully, through Christ’s death on the cross God himself launched a campaign to exchange the penalties of our toxic choices for his eternal rewards. I can think of no better time to embrace this offer than during these final days leading up to Easter.

Meadow Rue Merrill writes for children and adults from a little house in the big woods of midcoast Maine.

Her memoir, Redeeming Ruth:

Everything Life Takes, Love Restores, releases May 1. Connect at www.meadowrue.com