January 14, 2014
Unencumbered
In this type of weather
Charlie the dog climbs over snow banks and gets snow packed between his toes. Then
he stands there with his paw in the air waiting for you clean off his foot. When
we’ve put booties on him, he gets indignant and sidesteps down the sidewalk
shaking first one leg and then another trying to throw off the booties. If you
think a one-dog Conga Line you get the picture. Charlie’s antics remind me that
I too have a few things I need to throw off. “…let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily
entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”
(Heb 12:1 NIV)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Hebrews 12:1 is perplexing. “Everything that hinders…” is a whole lot. Let’s scope out just how much. First, what is it to hinder? Then, everything that hinders what? Merriam-Webster says hindering is to slow or make progress difficult, as in hampering, impeding, delaying, or preventing. Now, a lot of things can actually slow, hamper, or impede progress, though maybe not preventing it. So, slow how much? Just a little, like a tiny little or a lot little? I remember a mom who feared because her adolescent often wore a T-shirt with a dragon motif. She was sure that was a hindrance to his new life. He thought she was. Then who was? Or what? And when people get religious a little more they always find a deeper insight accusing even lesser things of hindering even more. It seems like the more you dig into God’s Word for cleaning up, and actually do clean up, the more you find needing cleaned up.
-----It’s that onion thing. And the author of Hebrews wants it done, like, Shazam! Just throw off everything of negative effect! Well, not to be sassing the Lord, or anything, it is a nice thought, but if you spiral into it literally, it digs a hole straight into the nut house, since almost everything hinders what you’re doing by distracting at least it’s necessary amount of attention.
-----The more literal translation is “Let us throw off every weight…” The Greek word here - ong-kos - has a technical meaning of a mass bending or bulging from its load. It is from this coloration that it receives its metaphorical meaning of “hindrance”. That’s a little more sensible. Now we’re talking about a load requiring the old “bent arm” to carry it (a reflection back onto ang-kal-ay - a bendy, achy arm.) Now we are talking about a weight of a very different sort, a weight taking a rather inordinate amount of your effort without adding any progress.
-----Oops. What do I dare mean by that? A sack of potatoes is a weight. Let’s not jog with a sack of potatoes, ok? But I bet you I could make a pair of two-pound wrist weights speed my jogging. These are not just inappropriately positioned weights. Like kicking the legs on a swing flings you higher and higher, as long as the kicks are synchronized to the swing, so also the arm motions will throw those two pound weights into momentum. So intuition would think, anyway. It’s a different process than is the swing thing. The extra four pounds would have to be carried along, and thus would hinder if not for the fact of the muscle tone they would generate. Now, back to the potatoes. When I was a kid, Montrose High had a wrestler who ran everyday up a hill with a hundred pound bag of potatoes, a real ongkos! And you never found the kid pinned to any mat!
-----Hinders what? The new life is very, very big indeed, because it is not yet completely fished out from the old life. That’s why the onion-layer thing. The more we fish the more we find the intricacies of our line intertwining everywhere we can hardly perceive. So here, we find the verb action of “throwing off” to be that famous, Greek, continuous-present tense. The Lord gives us each His Spirit to run inside us. What hindered yesterday’s step was thrown off yesterday. What hinders the step today is the weight to be thrown off today. What will hinder tomorrow’s step isn’t a hindrance today, but is a big bag of potatoes making us muscley enough to keep our backs off the mat! Tomorrow we pitch it, too, and run, or get pinned.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment