Hard Words

 

 

“Elise,” our four year old’s brother said urgently.  “What do you call animals that lions catch and eat.”

For the last three weeks, our home has been deluged with coloring pages of lions and tigers.  Elise loves to color (some might call it scribble) and the only thing she wants to color are pictures of big cats.  Other girls might like princess pictures or things like that, but Elise has moved from an obsession with dinosaurs onto tigers.

Elise began to think.  You could see on her face that she was trying to remember if she learned about this in preschool.  “Come on, Elise,” Elliot said.  “What do you call animals that lions eat?”

At this point, something clicked in Elise’s brain.  “You call them MEAT!”  She said and shrieked with laughter.

“No,” Elliot said.  “They are prey.”

Elise was not listening to her brother at all.  “They’re meat!  They’re meat!”  She chortled as she colored a coloring page with a tiger on it a luminescent shade of green.

Lions are supposedly the kings of the jungle.  Whether or not the other animals view them as such, they have been named animal royalty by humans.

(Lions are not particularly royal, neither do they live in the jungle – they live on the savanna.)

In a way, I suppose it doesn’t really matter if you call antelopes prey or meat, the ones that are caught by lions do not enjoy their fate.  A cow on the table is steak or beef, but the name doesn’t change the life changing event that brings them to the dinner plate.

It seems as though humans are good at giving things names that soften the impact of their actions.  Pastors have moral failings rather than immoral, sinful behavior.    People don’t tell the whole truth rather than indulge in lies.

The problem is that as long as we are not honest with ourselves about the significance of our behavior, we will never have victory over it.  In Romans 12:3, Paul told the Roman Christians, “I give each of you this warning: Don't think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us.” (NLT)

Honesty about the severity of our sin and the impact it has had on those around us is the beginning of a new path that leads way from euphemisms and towards conquering that sin.  That is the most important thing of all.

The Real Cure

 

 

“What do you have there?”  I asked my four-year old daughter.  She seemed to be carrying a magazine that looked suspiciously like one of my medical journals.

“It is a doctor’s magazine!”  She told me proudly.

“Interesting,” I said.  “Are you learning lots of things about being a good doctor?”

“Yes,” she said with confidence.  She flipped the magazine open and stopped at a page which had pictures of people with skin disorders that seemed to have waited too long to seek medical attention.

“What are those pictures of?”  I questioned my daughter.

“These people have TERRIBLE rashes!”  She told me definitively.  I could see that my daughter, precocious as she is, has a future in the medical field.  Maybe she could even start work soon to help me out in my office.

“Do you think they need a special cream to help them get better?”

“Oh, no!”  She shook her head.  These people were too far gone for cream to help them out.  “They don’t need cream.  They need a doctor!”

I found this interchange with my young daughter quite amusing.  At the same time, there is some truth to what she said.  I see people in my office every day who thought that what they needed was not a doctor, it was a particular home remedy.  The Googled their symptoms and tried all of the things that Chat GPT recommended – twice – before finally knuckling under and coming to see me for some other treatments.

It seems that Jesus understood this for He said, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  (Mark 2:17)

In this case, He was speaking of people living holy, righteous lives.  Perhaps there was a little bit of a dig at the religious people of His day.  The Pharisees believed that they were “all that.”  They needed no help because they were completely righteous.

The reality is that all of us – even the best – need Jesus’ help.  We cannot truly overcome sin, questionable motivations, and bad attitudes without His help.  And yet, we struggle along, putting the same, unhelpful creams on the rashes of our soul.

What we really needed the whole time is not Dr. Chat GPT, or a special spiritual salve.  What we needed was a specialist capable of diagnosing our heart condition.  What we needed most was a Savior.

Higher than a House!

 

“Elise, what animal can jump higher than a house?”  Elise’s dad was asking her a really hard question.

Elise thought and thought.  “I think that Mr. Dinosaur can jump higher than a house!”  She told me with confidence.  (Mr. Dinosaur is a small stuffed T. Rex that hangs out with Elise at bedtime.)

Elise’s sister, Victoria, was listening in on this conversation and she decided to put in her two cents.  “No, Elise,” she said.  “Any animal can jump higher than a house, because a house can’t jump!”

“Well,” I said, trying to encourage both of my daughters.  “Elise is right that a dinosaur can probably jump higher than a house (that is, if there were any dinosaurs still around to jump), but Victoria you are right that houses don’t jump.”

I began thinking about this riddle and I realized that it isn’t totally accurate.  I suppose that any animal can jump as high as a house, but some animals simply don’t jump.  Elephants, Hippos, Rhinos, and Sloths do not jump at all, therefore they can’t jump higher than a house – they, like a house, don’t jump.

Somehow from there, my mind went to the famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking.  Stephen Hawking couldn’t jump higher than a house, although to turn things around a little bit, a house couldn’t jump higher than Stephen Hawking either.  I’m not sure who should feel worse about this comparison, the house or Stephen Hawking.

(I know Mr. Hawking is no longer with us, but it still is an interesting theoretical thing to contemplate.)

Then, what about Baba Yaga’s house?  Since it stands on chicken legs, surely it cannot only walk around, but jump!  Suddenly, my amazing riddle to stump my four-year-old daughter disappeared in a cloud of mythological dust.

Some of us, quite simply are over thinkers.  We analyze things to death – even children’s riddles that are simply designed to amuse and not bemuse the hearers.  The problem, of course, is that overthinking can lead to anxiety and distress.

Psalms 94:19 says, “When doubts filled my mind, your comfort gave me renewed hope and cheer.”  (NLT)

There isn’t really any solution for doubt and anxiety better than relying on God and feeling His comforting arms supporting us.  For, doubts do dismay and anxieties destroy peace, but God’s love reaches past all of them to give wholeness. 

He even grants peace to those of us who can’t decide who really can jump higher than a house.

Changing Things Up

 

 

“How are things going?”  I asked the older gentleman sitting across from me.

“Terrible,” he replied.  “I just don’t feel good most days.  I’m tired and out of sorts and none of my doctors can figure out what is going on with me.”

I looked up. I was one of his doctors and I could tell he was feeling frustrated.

It had been three months since Al had been in last and these were the same sorts of things he had been talking about the previous time he was in.  “Have you started using your CPAP machine yet?”  I asked him.

“No,” he said.  “I can’t use that thing.  It gives me claustrophobia.  I tried it once a year ago and I could tell right away it was a no go for me.”

“I think it would help,” I said.  “You definitely have sleep apnea.  How about smoking.  Have you cut back or quit that?”

“No,” Al said slowly.  “I haven’t really made much headway there either.”

We went over a couple of other things that I had suggested the last time he was in the office, and it turned out that he had implemented zero of them.  “I guess I’m not a very good patient, am I?”  He asked, ruefully.

“You’re a normal patient,” I said.  “Most of us struggle to do things we know we should, but I’ll keep bringing them up and hopefully as time goes by you will begin to feel better.  I know you won’t feel 17 again, but I think you could feel quite a bit better than you do right now.”

There is a famous quote (misattributed to Albert Einstein) that says, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Even as we come to the beginning of 2024, it bears asking the question, “How was 2023 for you?” 

This is not a question about financial valuation or wonderful trips.  The question is how is your relationship with God and your family today, January of 2024, compared to those same relationships a year ago?

Hopefully, you can say that they have improved over the last year, but most of us will admit that they could be better.  The question then is very simple: “What are you going to do differently next year to make sure that these things improve?”

The point is that if you do the same things in 2024 that you did in 2023, you should expect the same results.  If you spend limited time in prayer, limited time with your wife (or husband), and continue to be highly critical of your family members, there is no reason to believe that your relationships with the most important people in your world will do anything other than stagnate.

In Ephesians 4:22-24 Paul said, “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”

I pray that as we head into the new year, we would make wise decisions about the most important things in our lives – our relationships with God and the people around us.  If we reach January 1^st of 2025 and our bank accounts are full and overflowing and our relationships are bankrupt, that will be a disaster.  Far better to make different (better) decisions than in the past, for that is the only way that we will see the results we really want.