All right, my words are
coming back to haunt me and I’m now contemplating my own spiritual needs. I’ve
written before about my struggle with the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Coveting
is not my problem, but I now suspect my perception and obsession with fairness
may lead to envy. In The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard the workers
began to grumble against the landowner who paid all the workers the same wage
regardless of how much work they had done. The landowner responded, “Friend, I
am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the
same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I
want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous” (Matt
20:13-15 NIV)? Obviously my focus on fairness and equality keeps me from seeing
generosity.
2 comments:
Gail;
-----Life has become easier for me to swallow after I began envisioning my small niche to its entire whole. Actually, I would have to use my imagination an incredible amount to do this, because six and a half billion people, each with his own niche, is a mighty big whole. But the point isn’t in knowing or even imagining every niche. It is in realizing how uniquely tuned into a very, small area of space and portion of matters is my niche and each of everyone else‘s.
-----I can do better imagining the niche beside me, especially when it has become proximate enough that my niche and it begin having cross effects. Now is where fairness and equity begin raising expectations. Forget that “equality” thing. It is a godless, collectivist, concept about which plots to capture and own your being are formed by political bandits. There is no equality anywhere, not even amongst the ants, which the collectivist gang of thieves so love to use as an example to convince you to surrender to them. Get down on your hands and knees, and look closely at those little bugs. One carries a grasshopper antennae. Another carries a grasshopper leg. Not much equality there. Oh yes! They will each carry their load to the communal storehouse, but one’s load is heavier than the other’s, and it took more chewing, prying, and twisting to get it off. Yet come time for dinner, each will get only a mandible full. Of course, the mandible full of one is equal to the mandible full of the other, but it is hardly fair, because the work of one was more than the work of the other. Gee. Where have we heard that before?
-----Everywhere you look in nature, everywhere you look in humanity there is inequality. There are bigger and littler bodies, better and worse skills, more and less intelligence, and least talked about lately, more and less effort (because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feeeeliiings.) That ain’t fair! Or equal. But actually, it is. Because is is all any of it needs to be.
-----I love my niche in life because it is mine by the hand of God. Being a CPA, over the last thirty years I’ve had opportunity to see what a whole lot of people have in life compared to how hard they’ve worked and been responsible, or not. I’ve spent a lot of years going, “Poor me. How come I don’t get that for my eight hours per day?” Or, “I know I work harder than him! How’d he get so lucky?” But when I finally came to view the reality God has created as a gigantic matrix of situations, each situation complete in itself from beginning to end for how it must effect the situations it touches is when I began realizing that God needs me to perform specific things at specific times for effecting the better for the rest of the situations mine directly impacts, or at least to make a “bettering” effect for those it indirectly impacts. God’s matrix of situations does not have identicals. They’re all unique. Therefore, none are equal. So nothing is fair. Especially when we consider we get eternal bliss for having lived most of our lives as complete rapscallions. Thank God nothing is fair! So finally I went, “Who cares?! As long as I snip the leg off the grasshopper God has led me to carry, I am as happy as a bug in the grass.” If my friend’s carrying only a piece of cricket dander, then God bless him too. “Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him.” (I Cor 7:17) You see, this all means God is then the one I need to most relate to.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Steve definitely something for me to chew on!
Thanks, Gail
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