May 14, 2012
Enough is Enough
Six year-old Lydia decided she wanted long hair, so for the last few
months she hasn’t had her hair cut. However recently she told her mother, “I think it’s time to get my hair cut, it’s
been growing long enough.” We believers are so much like Lydia. We ask God
for patience and self-control and then a week later we do our own assessment
and think we’ve been patient-ing and self-controlling-ing long enough.
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Gail;
-----What goes forward and backward at the same time and takes you everywhere you go? Answer:) Your mind. Everything you think and feel is the effect of relating past experiences rendered into knowledge, moods, and attitudes to currently developing situations and events. Everything that happens causes your mind to dig back through your past for relevant responses. For many people, this is a comfortable place for the mind to linger and an easy-chair for making decisions. It is always easier to know what to do next than it is to figure out what to do next. So the tendency towards old habits is strong for the person comfortable with his past.
-----But both patience and self-control are of the group of many things requiring the mind’s search backward for relevancies to carefully attend its search forward for what’s coming your way.
-----Some things coming your way are very much in your control. For instance, a paycheck next Friday is in your control by working well until then. Kind of related to that is having lights tonight to see your way to bed. Just keep the power bill paid. But, it may come rudely to your attention on Wednesday that your employer was operating entirely on an Obama stimulus grant, which it spent up by Tuesday, so you won’t have a paycheck on Friday. Then upon arriving home to crawl into bed and sulk, you even find you must do that in the dark because his war on the coal industry successfully drained the grid of its power. No one can really look into the future and know what’s coming.
-----But with a large degree of certainty, we usually imagine the very near future as being basically the same as was the very near past. But this method of casting our minds down Future Lane becomes tainted by the same comfort and easy-chair mentality that wants to settle into the way things have always been. It’s just easier to imagine the same old things happening again, which in turn makes planning easier. And too many people are doing it. But greater wisdom understands life to be about more than what comes easy. It is about emergence and construction.
-----Emergence is what your future situation comes to be by the intermingling of all the ongoing circumstances outside of your control (so pray and trick emergence.) Construction is what it comes to be by intermingling with emergence all the circumstances which you do choose by your control. Imagination is the only binoculars we have to peer into the possibilities of the future and determine what courses of action and attitudes might develop for us. But seeing those possibilities depends upon not overlaying the past upon the future. Then planning can choose the best. Self-control selects actions that will be causes towards effecting those plans. And patience waits for the appropriate, emergent circumstance in which your next action will be the more successful.
-----The process is most explainable in terms of working and accomplishing things. Yet, it is even more relevant to processes of drawing conclusions and developing attitudes and behaviors concerning the way you think and feel, because, frankly, the way you think and feel are from where the way you succeed comes. The greater knowledge and wisdom comes from not only mixing patience and self-control into your activities, but from mixing them into your thought and feeling processes, as well. “My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; yes, if you cry out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures; then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.” (Prov 2:1-5)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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