September 26, 2007
A Pastor's Pondering this week.
A couple of weekends ago we held our annual church picnic. It was a beautiful fall day, with tasty food and lots of fun and laughter. What a joy it is to gather as God’s people and in the blessings of life.
We met at the Capitol View Park in Kensington. There is a very nice meeting hall in the park with tables both inside and out to provide comfortable seating whatever the weather may be. But there was one problem with the facilities: one long, wooden table is about four inches shorter than it should be.
That seems like a miniscule thing to complain about, and it would be, except for the consequences of that small flaw. When you sit down at that one wooden table, your kneecaps are exactly at the height of the sharp wooden edge of the support bar underneath the table. So, when you scoot your chair up to your meal you can imagine what happens, can’t you? Your knees and the wood have a painful collision.
It seems reasonable, though, that after the first time this happened to someone at the table, everyone else would take notice and avoid the same mishap. Yet time and time again when one of us would come back to the table, even after laughing and shaking our heads over someone else repeating the avoidable injury, we would scoot and smart once again!
The reason I think so many of us left with repeatedly bruised knees is that over the years of our lives we have come to expect that when you sit down and scoot up to a table your knees will fit! That is just the way things happen. We sit down and slide up to the table and it does not hurt. It is difficult to adjust the patterns of a lifetime to a new reality—even when it hurts. But if we don’t remember and change those patterns, we will continue to get hurt.
I wonder how many patterns in all of our lives need to change to avoid needless hurts to ourselves and others? May the Lord help us all to be willing to change.
