October 14, 2010
Naughty Chair
My friend’s three year-old daughter was misbehaving so she gave the child two options. (1) The child could cooperate or (2) she would have to go to the naughty chair. “Hmm” said the child. “Let me think about that.” Her comment has a ring of familiarity to it. Often our lack of action telegraphs to God that we’re still thinking about cooperating with the Spirit.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----If you think about the condition of nature in this world, it is easy to understand why your friend’s three year-old would consider her options and why we consider ours with God. The angels do not bring us food and water while we sleep like Elijah awoke to under the broom tree in the wilderness. We must wisely use our twenty four hours a day and the few skills we have to acquire even the meager necessities of life. What we do, where we do it, and how much we do it become such mundane daily decisions that we do not often give thought to their impact upon our basic survival. I think everyone has someone in their lives who does not make these decisions well and who are therefore not self-supporting. They provide a contrast useful for noting the importance of our decisions to enjoy the work we must arise in the morning to do all day so that we might enjoy the food we eat and the clothing we wear in the home we’ve earned for the day. Everything of life is about deciding what will occur if we do this as opposed to what might happen if we do something else, and which alternative may be more important for today and lend more possibilities to tomorrow. Even the child learns this in its play. This is the economy of a broken world, a place of insufficient supply where the weight of survival falls upon the shoulders of self-dependency. And this sweat-of-the-brow economy develops a calculating mind.
-----I don’t have good evidence to know, but I believe our relating to God in such a manner seems out of place because His kingdom has a different economy. I believe the nature of the individual in it is basically different because time is not limited and supply is always sufficiently available. In his perfectly created state, man had only to do the walking to a tree and the raising of a hand to pluck from it his food for the day. Even the elements of the environment were accommodating to the point clothing and shelter for the body’s protection were unnecessary. Everything needed was at hand because the interacting love and care for one another between God and all His creatures, and between all His creatures amongst themselves, naturally provided an abundance simply from behavior typical of interrelationships made of love. I can only imagine, but I think decisions in such circumstances would not be squeezed out by the pressures of requirement, but rather would flow out of the joys of engagement. Nor do I think decisions would be about alternatives that are made mutually exclusive by the constraints of limited time, for, by the nature of eternity, there would always be time for enjoying all the other alternatives, too.
-----But in such an economy, man chose the one mutually exclusive alternative God did give to him, the one of self-dependency under the pressures of limitations. Our frame of mind is not as it should be. God interplays with our lives through our circumstances, usually, and more supernaturally if He so needs. And we still tend to meet His interplay with the alternative-picking mentality of a passing economy rather than with a trusting resignation to the realignments He causes.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment