The other day I was eating breakfast at Denny’s when a family with two
rag-a-muffins sat in the booth behind. The children were in the 3 – 5 year old
age group and from the conversation it sounded as though the family might be
staying in the motel next door. The children wanted pizza for breakfast and the
mother put her foot down. “You’ve had
piazza three days in a row. You need to eat more healthy. How about pancakes or
fruit and yogurt?” The children dug
in their heels, incorporated tears with their protest and then mom relented and
let them order pizza with hot chocolate. Although it’s not a laughing matter, I
can’t help but see shades of God’s people in the character of those children.
We too have been known to dig in our heels, and mingle our wishes with tears
and sometimes God lets us have our way…even if it’s not in our best interest.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----There was a time in my life when thinking that somehow where I was and what I was doing was God’s way...precisely. It isn’t that I don’t think I live in His way now. I just wised up to that precision thing. People who think God wills only one alternative out of all the choices available for each of their moment to moment decisions scare the daylights out of me. My ambivalence is not at all about whether or not God would be a tyrant for so precisely willing a particular alternative. I trust Him. It is the guy beside me whom I may not entirely trust. And myself whom I trust less.
-----I haven’t considered the works that would earn my trust as coming from rigid and inflexible perspectives. Nobody’s decisions operate without effect upon somebody else. This principle occurring millions of times over creates culture in communities. So then, where the many decisions of many people intermingle into such networks, who is responsible for keeping everyone’s decisions to the precise alternative God has willed for each choice such that the entire network might not accumulate any static of error? I assure you, there are some people who are just bursting to step forward and scream, “It is I!” We have seen their churches, their businesses, and their governments mimic the Hindenburg.
-----God has a purpose for us all. It will be reached by the collection of all our decisions. Some decisions will be right, some will be wrong. But using His attitudes in figuring why we should do the things we do and to whom we should do them brings into visibility categories of alternatives from which any one chosen would please Him. And certainly He might be more pleased with a particular choice rather than some others. He might be more displeased with a certain one than any other, too. But most always there is an array of alternatives containing more than one choice pleasing to Him.
-----To think there is always that one and only thing which will please Him is to overrate our individual importance in the scheme of His overall purpose. Why else would our own individual life require so much exactitude? He does have a purpose for each of us. But it is usually in doing things the way He would do them more than in doing the things He would do. The things He would do were the particular elements of the purpose He lived. They had to be precisely the right things done in precisely the right manners, because His individual purpose was pretty important. But the things I must do are the elements of God’s purpose for me, which is not quite so critical, because I don’t need to save the world. He already did that. I merely need to walk the bridge He built and to shine light for others who need to see the bridge too. Doing that has more to do with how and why I choose my alternatives than it does with exactly which ones I choose.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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