September 20, 2012
Grudgingly
My mother, bless her
heart, perfected the art of never forgetting an infraction. Many years ago she
was in a doctor’s waiting room for an extended length of time and she
eventually left without ever seeing the doctor. She held a grudge against this doctor
because he didn’t have the courtesy to at least tell her why there was a hold
up in the scheduled appointment. Fast forward 20 years and this same doctor,
whom she had never met before, actually saved her life by putting in her
pacemaker. She admitted the doctor gave her excellent care, but she couldn’t
let go of the fact that at one time he had kept her waiting. Spiritually
speaking believers can fall into a similar trap when we expect the Lord to keep
our scheduled appointments.
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Gail;
-----You remind me of what Peter said about attitudes in the last days being “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.” (II Pet 3:4) If we were giant redwood farmers with the patience we now have nobody would have any redwood furniture. Some things happen quick enough to be captured within our attention spans, but most things develop over periods of time far in excess of them. Then our memories are so sketchy we can not form a purely true perception from what snippets of something our attention spans have caught here and there.
-----Information, although maybe arising from particular circumstances and having therefore particular aspects, is yet highly fungible. That is, a piece of information can apply to a variety of circumstances. For instance, I’ll give you the information of it having four wheels and two axles, and you tell me what it is. It could be a wagon, a car, even an airplane. This is my favorite example of information’s fungible nature, because it could even be a gear cluster inside a child’s toy, or an ancient grain mill. Four wheels and two axles can belong to any of those things and to far more. So can being late to an appointment.
-----If I added one more bit of information to the wheels and axles, for instance, the two axles crossing each other perpendicularly at their centers, now you know this highly fungible information applies to a very narrow range of circumstances which excludes the wagon, car, airplane, and gear cluster. And with one more piece of information - the wheels being made of stone - you know I am referring specifically to the grain mill. But the grudge will hold to the highly fungible information, dismissing the specific information, so it can insist upon a car.
-----Grudging attitudes lead to ignorance, a sad and, in a sense, insulting way to express it. Ignorance is not the same as stupidity. (And I know folks do not like using either term, but let’s not begrudge the truth of it’s fitting vocabulary simply to salvage emotions.) Capable minds become ignorant due to ignoring information rather than to being unable to make use of information. The grudge is like a bad sheep in the pasture butting and shoving all the other sheep out. It is the protection of judgmental purviews; it is the shifty, settling dust of subjectivity obscuring the specifics of reality. It sees only through the eye of one chosen moment and subjects the entire body to the darkness within that moment’s walls.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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