July 06, 2007
Stop and Think
Parents often caution their children to think before they act. When doing woodworking projects that requires cutting angles, my husband mutters to himself, ‘OK stupid - now stop and think’. Jesus dipped a piece of bread in a dish and handing it to Judas said, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” (John 13:27b NIV) Quickly? Knowing what Judas was contemplating, I would’ve been saying, “Whoa Judas, stop for a minute…let’s think this thing through.” Apparently the time for thinking had already passed.
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Gail;
-----I grew up on a fish hatchery. Dad constantly told me as I was growing up, “Always think through all of the effects of what you are doing.” For the sake of the fish, it was important advice. Before he left for a noon meeting in town one day, when I was only 17 or so, he gave me the task of sterilizing four ponds prior to moving fry (baby trout) into them. The water from these ponds flowed down a ditch and dropped into a culvert joining a different flow of water that flowed through the lower half of his trout farm. At the point the water from these ponds I was to sterilize joined the other water flow, there was the choice of diverting it down another ditch and away from all the fish in the lower system.
-----Now, I knew that the chlorine used for the sterilization process was deadly to dad’s trout. But I also knew that in the low water time of the year the fish down-system needed all the water they could get. I also had frustrated dad with a barrage of questions about this process, and I had barely understood the answers he gave me. So, I guessed. The fish need water. Surely the chlorine would dilute enough when it mixed in with the other flow of water.
-----Three days of cleaning up dead fish gave me enough time to ponder the number of factors that really are involved in thinking a problem through to an acceptable solution. Though trout need a lot of good water, they can withstand a couple hours of a reduced flow much better than they can withstand a couple hours of a deadly poison, even when diluted. Oh, my! The things a hasty child does not consider! Unfortunately, this also became a tipping point into a several year spell of thinking which had me convinced that life was too complex for my little mind to figure out. Through those years getting to the end quickly is what interested me.
-----Maybe Jesus understood Judas’ opportunity to think things through one last time if he did not quickly do what he had planned. What Jesus had planned was too important to be sidetracked by a repenting Judas. Then again, maybe it was just getting late and Judas had been procrastinating. I would like to think that Judas’ doing the evil quickly would represent his doing it without complete thought, which would make him less culpable in the evil of the deed, and therefore more forgivable at the end. But that is both an underestimation of the size of God’s mercy and an avoidance of the “hung himself” thing. In the final analysis, insufficient thought always seems to be trailed by some form of disaster. Thank God, in Judas’ case, the disaster was his and Satan’s.
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