It's funny how some of the things we spend a life time learning, are the things we need to unlearn. This week, I planned to carve out some long needed alone time with God. Since the end of the last school term, I've been running off of adrenaline, going from one task to the other. I could feel myself getting a little cranky and overwhelmed. It's difficult to try to cleave yourself away from work when it feels like there's so much that needs to get done. On Tuesday, I got to go on a kayaking trip to Granchester with my friend, I finally started to feel relaxed. We passed by a tree with a rope tied to it and I thought about how much fun it would be to swing into the water. Later on, my friend and I discussed the possibility of making that "tree-swing" one of our adventure goals when the weather gets warmer. Before we both could even commit to the possibility, we thought about all the dangers associated with simply swinging from a rope into the river. She thought about the dead bodies that may be lurking in the water that would brush up against her, and the possibility of shallow waters and paralysis. Before she finished her thoughts, images of river parasites burrowing into my eyeballs shot into in mind. It's strange that entering into adulthood sometimes teaches us to be cautious at the expense of adventure.
When we grow up, we're taught to be more independent, more reliant on ourselves to make things happen. We're taught to be more cautious, to be responsible, to clean up after ourselves. We're taught to stop asking people to do things for us, and start doing them on our own. These are all great grown-up characteristics to have, but I started to feel so dependent on myself, which only seemed to draw me away from my dependency on God. That's when the thought first came to me, maybe what I needed to do was unlearn things, rather than learn more things. This is what my week of worship was for, to understand that I need God. I need Him to provide for the things I could never provide for myself. In learning to do this, I needed to unlearn some things first. I had to unlearn some of my independence, and be o.k. with being needy, and to allow other people to fill that need. I was reminded of a separate occasion where a good friend of mine tried to wash my dishes. I bumped into him at our college kitchen, and he totally caught me off guard by offering to wash my stack of dirty plates. I'm not even sure why, but I felt so embarrassed. I kindly refused his kind offer, hoping it would end there, but it didn't. Being a God-loving man himself, he grabbed my dishes and told me I needed to allow people to spoil me once in a while. I never felt so weird in my life. I stood there awkwardly for a minute, watching him scrub away at my mess, and felt the overwhelming need to have to do something. I danced around him dusting and cleaning whatever crumbs I could find just to make myself feel useful. The thought of someone else cleaning up after me seemed so foreign. I was so used to picking up after my own mess. Dirty dishes were a private affair, and someone had just invaded that privacy! I chuckled to myself a little because I knew I must've looked like a crazy person. I had to relax, let him do the work, and just come back later for my clean plates, this shouldn't be so hard.
I realize that I need to take some steps back in order to move forward. My "maturing" had some how taken away from what it means to abide in Christ. When I was first saved, I trusted God in handling my pain, my grief, and all those things that I felt were so out of my control. Somehow, all those things have fallen back on my plate of responsibilities. I've been trying so hard to deal with my issues, trying so hard to make things happen, trying so hard to tidy up my life to make it clean. With all these things to do, I had forgotten one of my earlier prayers to God; that He would lead me on a life filled with adventure. The chores and fears of my daily life seemed to be choking the joy out of simply living. As Easter approaches, I think about the death and resurrection of Christ and what it means. I have to remember that the sacrifice God made was intended to clean up the mess we could never clean ourselves, and the work accomplished on that cross is complete and final. There are no crumbs left for me to sweep away. The only thing I need to do is trust in that simple truth. It seems that the more the world teaches me, the more I unlearn this simple truth. I could only pray that God continues to show me how to unlearn what the world has taught me, so I can once again embrace his gift of grace. And should a moral be drawn from this story, let it be this: once in a while, let someone wash your dirty dishes, and if you ever see a rope tied to a tree, swing from it.
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