When I first moved to the South in 1977 I had never eaten grits. I’m sure some folks up North eat them but I’d never been exposed to them that I could remember. But I had eaten a lot of Cream of Wheat. That was my favorite breakfast as a kid.
So when I got my first plate of grits I treated it like Cream of Wheat. So, sue me. I was just another dumb Yankee. For a while I put butter, sugar and milk on my grits because it looked just like Cream of Wheat. Since my Cream of Wheat experience dominated, and grits looked the same, I simply forced the Cream of Wheat experience on grits. I was asked several times by curious southerners just what the heck I was doing to my grits. In their southern hospitality they just let me go on the way you do a child when he doesn’t know any better. Eventually, my wife convinced me that grits are not Cream of Wheat and are best eaten with salt and butter. She was, of course, correct. There’s no way I would ever treat grits like Cream of Wheat now.
It’s a harmless example because it wasn’t hurting anybody to eat grits that way. But it’s a good example of how we can let our previous experiences impose themselves on new experiences and block for a time the actual newness of the new simply because we cling to the old like a child clinging to his mother on the first dental visit. These are unstable and scary times that are capable of stirring up a fear and grasping of the old in us that far exceeds how you fix your grits. But, in principle, it’s the same.
The average person, especially those of us who’ve been around a while, is used to a more or less stable environment where all the things we’ve been taught about our system of government, laws and beliefs operates invisibly in our mental backgrounds. We’ve always known it was far from perfect but it’s worked well enough for us to live reasonably. But the trouble now is that it’s getting harder and harder to simply live reasonably. We now find ourselves having to expend great energies just to maintain simple things that used to be part of the background.
There are a number of things that make this unstable environment scarier than usual. One of them, I believe, is the fact that Americans live so separately from one another. For the most part there is no real community. Families are scattered all over the country because people have had to seek their fortunes in a state or city better suited to their field of work, they had to follow jobs, good schools or other reasons. The point is that life in America provides far more reasons to have to move around than to stay in one place, thus contributing to instability and, like Jell-O that was made incorrectly, lives that never get to settle well.
There’s no way I would be arrogant and ignorant enough to say I know the answer to this sad situation. But one thing is for sure; there are a lot of people who, in their understandable efforts to keep their situations as chaos free as possible, are reacting to this new unstable environment the same way I once did to grits. The difference is that grits don’t care how you eat them, but reality can crush those who, when it changes, try to treat it as if it hadn’t.
There is a wonderful verse (John 3:8) that says the wind blows where it will, and you hear it’s sound but you don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
Unfortunately, many churches have either made being born of the Spirit a spooky affair that one has to jump through some hoops before they attain it or else they don’t deal with it much at all. I think both approaches do a great disservice.
It’s clear from the above verse that being born of the Spirit confers the quality of flexibility. If we are born of the Spirit then our inward resources are such that they’re not really predictable to outside observation. Yes, we’re predictable in the sense that we’ll always (hopefully) do what’s right. But, if we’re drawing on the Spirit, it can’t always be predicted what form our acts (or the wisdom to refrain from acting) will take.
Time and again Jesus and his disciples offended religious sensibilities by doing the will of God in the flexible freedom of the Spirit. That same flexibility enabled them to avoid, not the problems that everyone runs into, but the torment of those problems.
It seems like the time is ripe for us to tap into that flexibility.
We live in a world that has forgotten how to bend even as it congratulates itself on being so open minded. Most "freethinkers" are prisoners who don't know it.
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