reckless <> careful

My new modem arrived today and I am back online. You don't know how valuable something is until you have to do without it for awhile. I can now research and write and reply to emails instantly with the flick of my forefinger. I can also run up and down the stairs in our home. These are both things I could not do a few days ago. I am sitting in the chair of gratefulness today, and I hope that I do not soon forget the privilege.

This past week I have had to receive more than usual. It is good for me. I always want to be willing to take what God is bringing my way. I have also seen that I get things mixed up sometimes. I am reckless where I should be careful, and I am careful where I should be reckless. I am reckless in areas where I think I know what I am doing. I am reckless when everyone else is doing something and I feel I should be able to do it as well (like play soccer with an injured muscle). I am reckless when I do not consider the value or cost to myself or another person. Mostly, I am reckless when I trust myself.

I am careful when dealing with God. I want to do the right thing and I think he is hard to please, so I hesitate. I am uncomfortable with what he is asking me, so I modify and compensate. I am unsure of what he is asking of me, it all sounds too crazy, so I rationalise and compare instead of act. I want to walk on the water when he calls my name, but there are so many things to consider first. One must be careful with these decisions, right? Very often, I am careful when it comes to trusting God, which just means that I don't. Consider the parable where the one servant buries his gift because he doesn't want to disappoint anyone. Bad idea.

See how these things are mixed up? I need to be more reckless when it comes to trusting God, and more careful when it comes to trusting myself. I need to just jump in and do what I see Jesus doing, to try to walk on the water, to try to heal people, to try to tell people the amazing truth, and to try to love outside of my safety fence. I need not to rely on my own abilities and experience and knowledge as if they were foolproof methods for making wise decisions and having things work out well.

Let recklessness and carefulness find their proper place in my life.

This a staircase beside the Welland Canal.

Comments

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

outWORD by Matte Downey

Search This Blog