I'm not listening!

A silly strand of reason exists in some minds: if someone is wrong about one thing, they are more than likely not accurate in most. To believe such a farce is foolishness at its brightest.

You know what I'm talking about, right? Say you are listening to your new favorite broadcast. You have been learning interesting little facts about whatever and boom, the speaker says something you completely and from your core disagree with. Suddenly you've not only personally boycotted the now formerly new favorite person, but your tweets and Facebook status bemoans the individual (and if you are from the American South, you may add a 'but bless his heart' at the end.)

But I don't do that at all, you say. Oh yes you do, we do it all the time. A reason why we often think we don't fall into such a thing is because we do it to book writers. I will briefly give some reasons why you should read authors you know you don't agree with:

1. They may say just something helpful. Sure, you think they are snide, arrogant and better off living in Antarctica but who knows where something helpful might come from.

2. They may be more than their phrases. I know that often I can hear one thing come from someone's mouth (or pen) and assume ten thousand things about that person. How dumb is that? That's like meeting someone for the first time; they sneeze in the first five minutes and you assume their body is devolving and they are gonna die soon. Yea, doesn't make a lick of sense, so let's not do it with people's words.

3. We are arrogant and prejudice and opinionated ourselves. We assume that we are not only correct in our opinion--which we may or may not be--but that the other person is a little lower on the respect chain than the apes in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

4. We could be wrong... (gasp)....Ahem, I said we could be wrong! I know, I know; it is a terrible thing to think that our thoughts are not divinely inspired, beating a golden path of righteousness as we go, but...

5. We need to learn to familiarize and respect contrary opinions. Many resist the counter (I'm not talking about running away from table-tops), they plug their ears when they smell something different. We need to learn how to walk into uncomfortable arenas of thought; shut up; listen; learn and not dismiss everything as asinine or sophomoric or from the Devil. Respect does not mean aqueous, get trampled on or accept everything. It means understand the idea and not resort to sophisticated belligerence and name calling.

There is an old saying: Learn to eat the meat and throw away the bone. When you eat a chicken wing you eat the meat, not the bone. This saying is applied to listening. If you willingly listen to someone who might think upside down from you and not immediately discount them, you will learn!

I thought this was a biblical blog? It is. Because of what Jesus did in dying for sins and coming back to life, sticking it to sin and death, we don't have to be right all the time. That doesn't mean we should ignorantly live and be okay in our stupidity; rather, we can know that ultimately God's truth will always, in the very end, be revealed and win out. We can be humble enough to listen to other people and not tune them out because those who have been saved completely by someone elses doing are already humbled (we just forget it most days).

Any thoughts or additions? Please comment.        

puppy joy

I have a puppy. She is almost 5 months old. There were often times when I would go to let her out of her crate and notice that she had peed everywhere and, apparently not caring too much, laid in her own mess. But when I came to the crate door she would go crazy! Her mouth was open; her body was grooving; her tail whipping around. She didn't seem to remember how gross she was. In her joy of seeing me--and probably anyone else who would let her out--she disregarded her mess and stinky odor.

We should be more like her. We are constantly screwing up and making significant messes. But God continues to come; God continues to love. I am not at all saying we should be cool with our sin; but because of repentance and what Jesus has accomplished on our behalf we should not refuse joy. 

For some reason, I have a meter in my mind: if I sin I have to wait a certain time limit before being okay with God, before I can crack a smile. This is a lie, though. There is not a word in the bible about mortifying yourself for God, for repentance. John Owen, a long-time dead guy, said that we have to be killing sin or sin will be killing us. This is true. But we are not to be like the priest in The Scarlet Letter who would wound himself after committing sin. No, Jesus died for our sin; we need to add nothing. I don't want to sin and I don't want you to sin but, as the end of the book of Jude reminds us, it is God who will keep us from stumbling and who will present us without blemish and in joy before the Father. 

We should be quick to remember our Savior's strength, not our sinful succumbing. Because of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, sin is no longer a gateway to wrath; Jesus has tread on sin and unplugged its power. 

So we have the opportunity for joy, even in our messes, for God has done what we could not; he took a three-day trip where we would have been obligated to live; he undid all that we made and gave all that we could never earn. So we could wag our tails in his presence.