September 17, 2009
Balancing Act
The other day while walking I noticed a couple of doves sitting together on a telephone line. When one bird flew away a ripple ran through the line leaving the other bird struggling to keep his balance. While the bird on the wire was trying to get his bearings, another dove flew in and settling next to his teetering friend, stilled the swaying phone line. I don’t know about you, but occasionally I find myself spiritually unsteady…and it takes another believer to come along side to give me balance.
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Gail;
-----On the way to work this morning the thought of diverging opinion crossed my mind. It is so easy for us all to think that what we know about life is the way things are. But we fail to fully appreciate the fact that what there is to know about everything is so monumentally vast, that no one person in his entire lifetime can do more than gain a tiny sampling of it. Furthermore, as evidenced by the oft stated unreliability of eye witnesses, even what we mentally note at any one moment from our sense of sight, or sound, or touch, etc. is only a small sampling of all the sensory input made available to our minds from that moment. It is no wonder then, that even within a general culture, and more particularly, within a sub-culture, there are large divergences of opinion. So the concept of subjective-reality has been offered to us as a smooth-over.
-----But subjective-reality, as useful as it may be, fails to achieve the full effect God intended for fellowship’s benefit. You may think blue while I think green, and that is ok if color is not the basic issue of a matter, or if it is, that the real color is not completely opposite the color wheel - like orange or red. The fact remains that the true color we are both pondering is in and of itself certain and particular, regardless of what either of us think about how we see it. Subjective-reality does not address the absoluteness of what is real, in fact, it is meant to be a diversion around the truth of things being what they really are.
-----God has made room for a more correct version of a subjective-reality in each of His believers. In speaking of differences of opinion, Romans 14:5b tells us, “Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind.” And at verse 22 it adds, “The faith that you have keep between yourself and God.” God calls us individually into a relationship with Christ, and that relationship maintains its certain individuality even with all the errors and incompleteness of the currently flawed human mind, and indeed, partially because of these shortcomings. Yet He has made obvious throughout Scripture that He and the way He made things are sure and true, existing without need of our minds to make them up. He underscores the relationship of our subjective thinking to His certain realities at I Corinthians 13:12-13, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully…” The key to fellowship in the face of all this is found in I Corinthians 13:4, “Love does not insist on its own way.”
-----So, what does all this have to do with the turtle doves on the phone line? I have seen perched birds engage another approaching bird in fighting. We all know this is about mating competition or territorial matters, but boiled down to its essence: each of the two birds are insisting upon their own ways. The bird that got to perch beside your turtle dove was obviously an excepted other, let’s say maybe, a turtle dove that saw things in a similar light. This is what forms sub-cultures and cultures: if your sample of knowledge is similar enough to my sample of knowledge, we can sit beside each other and be friends. In that way we can each preserve our own sample of knowledge and the perceptions we have drawn from it. And albeit there is a certain amount of appropriateness to this, God’s love desires the knowledge of Him to be spread across cultures, and the benefits of fellowship amongst His people to pass regardless of dissimilarities in accepted opinions. In fact, when one’s world is rocking, the offered comfort from another having a wider difference of opinions can lead to the expansion of both their perceptions, however cautiously received. By allowing the individualism each has in the Lord while maintaining the unity of Spirit, love, and faith in calling upon the name of the Lord, everyone grows in his own relationship with the Lord, and no one becomes enslaved to the artificial boundaries of cultural concepts.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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