Thought for Today
Numbers 23:19 God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind. Has he promised, and will he not do it? Has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?
Deuteronomy 28:20 The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do
Matthew 22:18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?
Matthew 23:13 "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.
This morning, I am frustrated! My mind is roiled and fraught with the complexities of modern life! When I woke up and went into the kitchen to make coffee, the indoor/outdoor thermometer was blinking and not showing me how cool it was outside! Ah, the aggravations and frustrations of life!
A portion of my angst deals with the fact that the thermometer involves an outdoor transmitter and an indoor receiver. There is no way to determine which has the dead battery. To simplify the process, I always change both sets of batteries at the same time. To make the whole process even more intolerable, the batteries must be inserted in a specific sequence, first those in the transmitter and then those in the receiver. We have other devices with that same issue of sequencing. Frustratingly, they are not always in the same sequence in those other devices.
Jesus never had to deal with the frustration and aggravation of dead batteries. Jesus never had to worry about searching through the ‘battery drawer,’ through the myriad assembly of different batteries, some cylindrical, some disks, all of different voltages and many specific to a single device in our house. Jesus never had to spend time searching for the instructions to a device, instructions left somewhere where I can immediately put my hands on them in time of ‘need.’ Where in the house that might be is always the dilemma.
Jesus was never frustrated, was he? Or, maybe Jesus . . . and even God understand our frustrations, large or small, trivial things like batteries and instruction books, significant things like sin and salvation.
It is easy to forget the basic truth of that passage from Numbers. God is God; God is not like us; we are created in God’s image. We are limited in time and space. God created time and space before God created us. God set us in the garden God created and only asked that we till and keep that garden, that we walk with God in the garden “Genesis 3:8 at the time of the evening breeze.” Instead, we created a world replete with battery-powered devices and could not even agree on a single size and voltage for the batteries.
Thankfully, God sent Jesus into Creation to help us get back on the right path. Can you hear the frustration in Jesus’ voice every time he uses that word ‘hypocrites’? Each time, I am reminded of one of my father’s favorite, oft-repeated lines, “You buy them books, and buy them books, and all they do is eat the covers.” Unlike my own children’s father, my own father had, on occasion, been forced to repeat his instructions . . . more than once. Jesus certainly empathized with my father.
I began today letting myself become angry and frustrated over a simple thing. It was not the first time. It will not be the last time. It is easy for all of us to become angry, frustrated, aggravated over small and simple things, losing sight of the greater things in our lives. No matter how crowded that ‘battery drawer’ is, that myriad of different batteries pales in comparison with the beauty and wonder of the world God has created for all of us.
How often has someone told you, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”? Our human proclivity is to obsess on the small stuff. For the rest of today, and hopefully for days to come, I plan to remind myself that in comparison to all else that God has gifted to me, it’s all small stuff. “Matthew 6:27 can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”
Stay safe, focus on God’s gifts to us all, trust God,
Pastor Ray