September 26, 2011
Under the Circumstances
During our announcement time yesterday the congregation learned that
one of our members had a severe stroke while attending a Christian Convention.
Our sister is in the ICU in Albuquerque, New Mexico getting the best medical treatment
available. The announcer encouraged us by saying, “She is in good care for the situation she is in.” It struck me
that regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in, believers can always
say we’re in good care for the situation we’re in.
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Gail;
-----Sometimes I get this interesting mental experience in which my imagination will see myself do something simple just before I do it, like reaching for the dishrag when I’m washing pots and pans or taking up my boots when I’m getting ready to leave for work. A lot of the simple motions we make throughout the day are seemingly automatic, but they are not actually. They are preceded by this kind of mental thought or “ imagination type plan of motion”. It just so immediately precedes such routinely repetitive action that it flashes by without conscious notice. Other times, like when we are pressed for time and have several things to do, we will mentally map out the best sequence for doing each thing as a set of instructions and then enter into the doing of that sequence like a computer running a program. All this phenomena relates to the same approach of selecting a set of courses in high school or college around a sense of personal interests, then taking those courses over the span of a few years. The involvement with structuring such mental maps for directing our attention, activities, and behavior becomes more and more manual the more we take personal responsibility for shaping our lives.
-----Some people take great responsibility for their lives, and they craft out well planned ones, though not necessarily well planned for good. Thieves are crafty, too. Others just tend to ricochet from one event to another throughout their time with less of a plan for where they are going and more of a plan for how to ricochet so they will tend towards the good rather than the bad. Otherwise they might become less crafty thieves.
-----All of this said is about the fact that every situation is quite intricately constructed of our own mental perceptions of what is happening around us and how we must change what of it we can or fit into what we can’t. It involves deep and personal meanings that we take as being our lives. God is indeed gracious for the way He acknowledges and blesses these constructs of our lives even though they are highly made of our own perceptions about situations. For as we perceive our lives to be our plans impacted by a certain amount happenstance, maybe it would be more accurate to perceive them as happenstance impacted by a certain amount of our plans. Our perceptions are merely what we understand about stuff around us, and frankly, if we better understood the stuff around us, we would chart better courses through it. And we would know certainly that at any moment happenstance could instantly become impregnable to our plans.
-----But knowing God, who ultimately controls all happenstance, is what makes adventure of even the worst of the impregnable. For if the fundamental essence of your plans are about knowing God, then whatever happenstance completely restructures your life, no matter how seemingly tragic, it is merely another situation through which to perceive His nature through His involvement. If we really think about it, then, the more joyfully we learn to adjust our plans for happenstance, the more our lives become a joyful adventure of discovering what He is being to us personally.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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