May 21, 2012
Knock, Knock
My mind was elsewhere when I came up to the big glass door of an office
building. I fully expected the manual door to open automatically, but by the
time I realized I was my own doorman, I had to do a stutter step and to keep my
nose off the glass. I sometimes do something similar with Jesus because there
is this expectation that once I’ve accepted Him as Lord and Savior the door
opens automatically. “For everyone who
asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be
opened.” (Matt 7:8 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----How would you like to go through the recognition and procedural determination processes every time you tied your shoe? “Let’s see, the shoe is on my foot, so I will have to bend over. I will need to contract stomach muscles and relax back muscles. I will need to reach for the shoe. With the other arm, too, now...” Gads! Imagine consciously going throw all the planning about where to put the string ends and all of the muscle motions it takes to run the fingers interlacing the strings. And that is aside from all of the minor muscle contractions around the rest of the body that are required for maintaining your balance while you’re bending over! Tying your shoes, walking, riding a bicycle, driving a car, eating a bite, and maybe most incredible - talking, reading, or listening all take voluminous motions almost completely controlled sub-consciously. The line between what functions should be left to sub-conscious duties and what should be consciously attended sometimes blur. Mistakes abound on both sides of this line due to misapplied duties.
-----Your incident with the door opens up another interesting line of thought. You expected the door to be automatic because the overwhelming majority of large commercial doors are. The human mind is always being driven into innumerable modes of continuous problem solution. It gravitates towards the normal first. When your mind felt that strangeness about your foot, whether consciously or not, it sought to determine what was causing a difference from the sensations it should be normally feeling. A quick glance probably confirmed what the mind may have conjectured before the eyes fell upon the untied shoe strings. But then again, maybe the eyes fell upon a tear down the side of the shoe instead, and the conjecture was found to be wrong. Mental adjustment became necessary lest you retie the shoe to no avail. Again, with thinking and feeling, there is that line between conscious and subconscious activity. Like tying the shoe, thinking has conscious and sub-conscious duties.
-----But these duties are more profoundly important. An incorrectly tied shoe may not feel right, or it may need tying again. Of course, one may veer left on a bicycle when one should have veered right and wind up in the morgue. That difference is indeed profound. But mental errors in the thought and feeling processes add to the information banks upon which more thoughts and feelings are made. Conscious choices are built into these information banks, sometimes corrective choices, sometimes erroneous ones. And certainly numerous interrelationships within them are made sub-consciously. If the mind stubbornly veers left always with no or little correction, the result will be a head-full of foolishness, possibly enough to reject Jesus Christ. Big mistake! But if right is always sought by the continuous inclination of the heart and wisdom and knowledge are desired more than gold and silver, the conscious direction of the mind will be to the Word of God, and the information banks supplying thoughts and feelings will be subjected to a constant state of grooming. This process operates kind of like a janitor always coming around to wash another nose-print off the door.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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