Our Head's Direction Follows Our Heart's Discretion
I've started watching another 90s family comedy, and this time Blossom has my attention. The title teenager's resolve to focus on life's positives animates the show from the quirky, catchy theme song and through her grins and dialogue. Predictably, though, it is when her joy lapses that I learned from her.
Her dad's separation and divorce from her mother happened four years ago, and he has, in a sitcom staple, started dating again. She attempts to drive off the interloper for her father's affections for no better reason she can express than that the new woman doesn't close the cabinets or cut vegetables correctly. Her way of doing these things is not exactly like Blossom's mother.
Caught up in the changes of life, many of which are out of our control, we can adopt such quibbling tendencies even in those transitions far less emotional than that Blossom's family faces. When we can't face the people who seem to have foisted change on us and express our disappointment, even our anger, the smallest differences with people in our new sphere can draw our focus.
Vegetable cutting or cabinet closing may be what comes to our minds and our lips, but only as stand ins for the positives of a time we would have again. Our persistent complaints about otherwise trivial points of comparison may also serve as a distraction against whatever we might have done differently or learned from in the previous chapter of life.
Thus, in transition, and we always are in one area or another, Jesus teaches us discipline succinctly. His three-word insistence in Luke 17:32 is that His will, "Remember Lot's wife." She is a one-woman representation of the idolatry in the next verse which would, Jesus says, lose our lives by trying to save them. My life, we easily adopt the belief with Lot's wife, is defined by a particular place.
My life, we can insist in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is given meaning in the context of a constellation of relationships to which we become accustomed. Take those away with a job title, a health status, a family responsibility, or a ministry role, and we are not sure who we are.
Our heart's fearful indulgence turns our head's direction. With Lot's wife in Genesis 19, we look back. Just as the old status quo she knew was irretrievable, so it often is with us. Yet, physically constructed to put our focus in one direction, we willfully give it to the past.
She died for that, and part of us dies too. Our fellow fallen human was focused on what she was losing instead of the reality of God's present provision and protection. Because fear rather than faith seemed to be her filter, she ignored God's grace.
Lord, she could have said as she walked by faith, You specifically intervened in the time to save my family, and I'm grateful. Lord, she could have confessed, I've grown accustomed to this set of circumstances in which I raised my family, and I resent You for not allowing me to decide when or if those changed. I, she could have modeled in repentance, could have been a more consistent witness to my sons-in-law, and I ask You to forgive me.
That this could have been the legacy of Lot's wife and was not does not keep us from, head forward, steadying in the same confession. Whether the Lord leads us by angels or by more ordinary means from one scene of life to the next, His is to lead. Teaching our hearts to worship and trust in that even when we don't know every detail of the new normal into which we move is an honest discipleship.
Meditating on the sovereignty and goodness of God even when we don't fully believe or fully see it can allow us by God's grace to avoid the fate of Lot's wife. The heart thus preached to consistently will dictate which way they had faces, and, Jesus says, the resulting focus of the eyes. Remembering Lot's wife thus disciplines us for discernment, preparing us to see that practical demonstrations of the goodness of God are not confined to the people or places He previously used.
Her dad's separation and divorce from her mother happened four years ago, and he has, in a sitcom staple, started dating again. She attempts to drive off the interloper for her father's affections for no better reason she can express than that the new woman doesn't close the cabinets or cut vegetables correctly. Her way of doing these things is not exactly like Blossom's mother.
Caught up in the changes of life, many of which are out of our control, we can adopt such quibbling tendencies even in those transitions far less emotional than that Blossom's family faces. When we can't face the people who seem to have foisted change on us and express our disappointment, even our anger, the smallest differences with people in our new sphere can draw our focus.
Vegetable cutting or cabinet closing may be what comes to our minds and our lips, but only as stand ins for the positives of a time we would have again. Our persistent complaints about otherwise trivial points of comparison may also serve as a distraction against whatever we might have done differently or learned from in the previous chapter of life.
Thus, in transition, and we always are in one area or another, Jesus teaches us discipline succinctly. His three-word insistence in Luke 17:32 is that His will, "Remember Lot's wife." She is a one-woman representation of the idolatry in the next verse which would, Jesus says, lose our lives by trying to save them. My life, we easily adopt the belief with Lot's wife, is defined by a particular place.
My life, we can insist in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is given meaning in the context of a constellation of relationships to which we become accustomed. Take those away with a job title, a health status, a family responsibility, or a ministry role, and we are not sure who we are.
Our heart's fearful indulgence turns our head's direction. With Lot's wife in Genesis 19, we look back. Just as the old status quo she knew was irretrievable, so it often is with us. Yet, physically constructed to put our focus in one direction, we willfully give it to the past.
She died for that, and part of us dies too. Our fellow fallen human was focused on what she was losing instead of the reality of God's present provision and protection. Because fear rather than faith seemed to be her filter, she ignored God's grace.
Lord, she could have said as she walked by faith, You specifically intervened in the time to save my family, and I'm grateful. Lord, she could have confessed, I've grown accustomed to this set of circumstances in which I raised my family, and I resent You for not allowing me to decide when or if those changed. I, she could have modeled in repentance, could have been a more consistent witness to my sons-in-law, and I ask You to forgive me.
That this could have been the legacy of Lot's wife and was not does not keep us from, head forward, steadying in the same confession. Whether the Lord leads us by angels or by more ordinary means from one scene of life to the next, His is to lead. Teaching our hearts to worship and trust in that even when we don't know every detail of the new normal into which we move is an honest discipleship.
Meditating on the sovereignty and goodness of God even when we don't fully believe or fully see it can allow us by God's grace to avoid the fate of Lot's wife. The heart thus preached to consistently will dictate which way they had faces, and, Jesus says, the resulting focus of the eyes. Remembering Lot's wife thus disciplines us for discernment, preparing us to see that practical demonstrations of the goodness of God are not confined to the people or places He previously used.
She longed for the status quo and ended as a statue oh no!
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