September 03, 2013
Hedge of Protection
The last few years
we’ve had a summertime problem with dogs using our yard as their personal rest
station and in the winter kids use the low growing evergreens as a slope for
sledding. It’s finally time to put up some chain link fencing, but the
assumption that my problems would be solved were dashed when the estimator remarked,
“Fencing won’t keep anything out; it only
serves as a deterrent.” I think his observation can also have a spiritual
connotation. Every once in awhile I mentally start building a spiritual fence thinking
that it will somehow keep sin out. The conversation the between Satan and God
over the man Job is a reminder that there is only one Master Fence Builder. “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan
replied. “Have you
not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have
blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread
throughout the land.”(Job 1:9-10 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Every psychologist agrees, everyone lies. They don’t at all mean everyone is a complete and total liar. I think some societies of nearly total liars have come to fruition upon the earth, and the smoke of their burning has long since gone up. Some yet grow and will soon burn. But psychology’s acknowledgement regarding the deceitfulness of the human heart is comfortably congruent with God’s revelation regarding the same.
-----We can not fence it out because it arises from within. The idea of fencing it out is the misperception that we have within us a separable conductor leading an orchestra of inward instruments radiating thoughts and feelings. If somehow we could shelter that conductor then it would not lead the orchestra into sour notes and disharmony. But the conductor is really a particular harmony or melody of the orchestra itself emerging into momentary focus before slipping away at the development of the next harmony it inspired.
-----So the sin and righteousness we are is a process of emergent expression. The more true and loving we make our process, the more right our thoughts and actions. But although God made the core concepts of truth knowable to man, all its depths and subtleties extend from realms far beyond man’s limited minds. We are left guessing and making logical assumptions about so much of truth’s topics that it is just not possible for us to get everything right. It’s like if I stood at Main Street and phoned you at Wal-Mart that I was holding up a coin, you would know the truth that I held a coin, but you would be left guessing if it were a quarter, nickel, dime, or the year of its minting, or of its general condition, or even whether it was an US coin or an ancient Roman one. If your decision to do something good at Wal-Mart depended upon some subtle characteristic of that coin, you would most likely get your decision somewhat wrong and do poorly by the nature of chance alone, regardless of how right you wanted to do it.
-----However, you could increase your chances of guessing the right characteristics of the coin by meticulously tuning each instrument of your orchestra more and more according to how you observed reality respond to each of the myriads of guesses you made in the past. The focus of your past experience upon what kinds of coins you found me having in my pockets and which kinds I most likely held up at certain times of the day would substantially narrow your chances of guessing wrong. Then by also training your orchestra’s harmonies to broaden enough to better generalize your decisions for accordance with a wider variety of coin characteristics, the chances of doing right increase even more. Humility is really not the action of always fencing yourself. It is more the action of adjusting yourself to what truths and realities you‘ve come to observe.
-----We can’t fence processes. All we can do is shape and refine them according to patterns of truth and wellness. If we could continually walk according to our spirit alive in the Holy Spirit as the patterns of our orchestra’s conductor, we then would hear a perfect harmony of sweet notes. But as our vision of outward details is extremely limited, so also is our vision for the inward subtleties of the spirit. Instead of seeing us within a fence, God gets to see how hard we try.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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