October 04, 2013
Returning the Excess
When my eight year-old granddaughter Lydia,
opened presents during her Birthday party the card from her great-grandmother
contained money. The card read, ‘Here is $1.00 for every year.’ Lydia giggled
as she counted the money, “There’s $10.00
here…and I’m only eight!” Without batting an eye or seeking any advice from
the adults in the room, Lydia pulled out two of the dollar bills and handed
them to me so I could return them to great-grandma Ruth. We all laughed at Lydia’s
quick thinking and her childlike honesty, but the situation gave me pause. God
often gives us more than we need or deserve, but how many of us so willingly
give the excess back to God?
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Gail;
-----During the past couple years I have been enjoining contemplation of the differences between God’s infiniteness and our finiteness. One simple difference is that God sees, knows, and feels everything, we don‘t. He experiences all things in every one of their particular situations in all the ways they are relevant to Him and to each other. This has somewhat to do with Matthew 25:45, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” Jesus, after all, was God, even while He was mortal man. That what I do to you I also do to Him is part of His infiniteness. But what I do to you has the least relevant and most indirect effect upon Joe of Kalamazoo. He has not an inkling of it, because we are finite.
-----So what? So we are tricked. Not by God, necessarily. It is the trick Satan played upon Eve. He took advantage of her finiteness to focus her attention upon herself. Had she been infinitely experiencing, as is God, she would not have been tricked because her simultaneous experience of all else would have delivered to her the appropriate truth about the tiny slice of blather Satan served to her. But such relevancy was for her imagination to correctly manufacture only from her memories of prior experiences. Everything I experience is limited to my perceptions; everything you experience is limited to yours. By this, evil catches imagination to reflect upon the self. If imagination is not freed to wander across the possibilities of others, then the self is all which eventually will be known. For an effectively brief moment, like a poke in the dark, Eve’s imagination was turned entirely to focus upon herself. In that moment she effected all mankind without a thought for Joe in Kalamazoo.
-----Bless Lydia’s little big heart! No distorting, scumbag of trickery got into it because she was willing to imagine her great grandmother as well as herself. If you are to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, then you will have to imagine the feeling of something to them as you know it feels to you. It’s elementary. So are children.
-----When our cups are full, any more pouring will produce overflowing. God knows Joe in Kalamazoo and his cup with room for more. Kalamazoo’s distance from you is not in miles, but in thought. When our cups overflow, we need another cup. The world is such that we can grab one for catching overflow unto our own sensations, leading imagination to an ingrown whither, entrapping ourselves in an imploding prison of finiteness. Or we can imagine Joe until we take his hand directly, matter not the miles, and pull his cup under ours, imagining how he feels catching this overflow of God’s generosity, and so, escape a little more from finiteness. It’s in a small way truth setting you free when imagining the feelings of others to serve them experiences of your excess for the Lord to feel.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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