knotting ropes and lowering rods of helium

As you can see from the photos below, my class is indeed tied up knots and trying to force helium rods to the floor. These were intentionally exercises in frustration in order to build teams and team-work.

I knew why we were doing these exercises, but life is rarely this clear. I find that I do not often practice honesty with myself or with God. If we do not do what God is calling us to do, or more simply put, if we don’t obey, then we aren’t believing. Yet we resist that judgement strongly. I often find a way to convince myself that actually I am obeying, when in reality I am not. Jesus says “leave all behind and follow me.” But we don’t. We rationalize it away and decide that Jesus is talking to someone else. He could not possibly be talking to me we think. Yet He is . . . and does. Hundreds of callings and commands and we pick and choose . . . or classify them as important and the unimportant. At least I do. You probably obey Jesus perfectly.

I am evading literal obedience at every turn. I have perfected the kind of double-speak that turns the commands and instructions of the Living God into whatever I want them to mean. It often sounds suspiciously like this . . . “What Jesus was really saying here is . . . .” Or something along those lines of sophisticated foolishness. When I try to avoid simple clean obedience, I find myself falling into ever deeper waters of ropes and rods, where things are much more complicated than they were ever intended to be.