April 22, 2011
Let’s Get Mikey to Do It
Years ago there was a Life Cereal commercial featuring three young brothers contemplating whether or not to eat a healthy cereal. The two older boys conspired to make the youngest boy the taste-test guinea pig. “Let’s get Mikey to do it.” It’s amazing how manipulative we are when it comes to getting someone else to do what we can and should do ourselves. We want someone else to ask a question…someone else to organize an event…someone else to go early or stay late. Somehow I think Mikey is going to have more bling in his crown than some of the rest of us.
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Gail;
-----I like the old adage: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people, and sometimes they use guns. It carries at its heart the principles that actions are divisible into motives and tools and that laying the fault of a motive upon a tool is a fallacy. Getting Mikey to do it is a tool. What’s the motive?
-----Human nature isn’t what it once was. God created it to be a thing of sheer beauty. Adam was placed in the Garden to express the beauty of his nature in his tilling. Remember, at this time he was made in the image of God, so the expression of his nature was the expression of God’s nature, too. I think Adam was given an autonomy of expression which by the nature of his godly perfection was automatically performed within the desires of God. His motivations and decisions were not only pleasing to himself, but also were pleasing to God. If they did not serve both pleasures, they simply did not exist. At that time, it was the first and only category of human nature‘s expressions. Then the fall added a new category of expression to his repertoire: what pleases the self, but not God. And from the friction between these two categories came a third category we wrestle with: what pleases God, but not the self.
-----Yet, the unfortunate addition of these new expressions to human nature did not entirely eliminate the first dimension of beauty. It merely buried it so deep in the undergrowth of failure that it rarely gets good expression. But man’s autonomy remained fully intact. Since his motivations and decisions became predominantly faulty, so did the predominance of the skills he developed through expressing them. Yet only the predominance of them, not all of them to the last one, abandoned the beauty of pleasing both himself and God.
-----It is in this condition of human nature the Holy Spirit gives gifts to those who love God. Sure, we are all messed up in different ways. But that also means the beauty of the soul as God created it shines through different cracks in the messed up woodwork, bringing to the surface godly expressions also in various ways. There still remains friction between the perfect God and His imperfect children, simply because perfection and imperfection can not blend. But for the child of God it is not a battling friction. It is a friction of God’s nurturing pressures against our imperfections, on the one hand, and of man’s inklings of godliness sparked by the contrasts of his own ungodliness against God‘s godliness, on the other hand. We are able to see things that should be which we ourselves are yet unable to be.
-----Our efforts to diminish in us the second category expressions often consume much attention we should have spent upon overcoming the lack of godly expressions caused by the third category. That tends to make us more Mikey’s brothers than it makes us Mikies. Granted, we will never become a Mikey unless we try the cereal for ourselves, but sometimes the inklings brought forth are significant enough to be done, yet they lay outside the realms of our own spiritual gifts. For those occasions, Mikey is a godly tool. In the end though, I think your observation properly views most of the Mikey events as proceeding from languid dispositions. There is too much third category human nature going on out there.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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