Blog
Dear Trailhead family,
Some teachers have a gift of taking a complex subject and making it infinitely more impossible to comprehend.
I had one such instructor at the prestigious School of Missionary Aviation Technology where I earned my airframe and powerplant license. This instructor’s name was Dean and Dean taught and understood electricity in a way that few people could. Dean knew electricity like a person knows their spouse after being married for 60 years.
Unfortunately, Dean understood electricity so thoroughly that he had a hard time explaining it to the unenlightened. And I was one such dim bulb.
I did pass Dean’s class but with the resolve to never make my living in electronics.
And so far, I’ve stuck to that commitment.
While we can all agree that understanding electricity is necessary for anyone working on avionics, our understanding of God and how we are to relate to Him is of eternally more significance.
Consider these words from C.S. Lewis about our experience and expectations of life with God in His Kingdom.
Lewis writes, “Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Or this thought from the Scottish Bible expositor Alexander MacLaren, ‘We may have as much of God as we will. Christ puts the key of the treasure-chamber into our hand, and bids us take all that we want. If a man is admitted into the bullion vault of a bank and told to help himself, and comes out with one cent, whose fault is it that he is poor?”
Whose fault, indeed?
The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God to the exiles living in Babylon, wrote, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
In other words, I have as much of God as I want.
But often, I find myself a “half-hearted creature, fooling about,” content with mud pies when infinite joy is on offer.
This realization helps me identify with the church in Laodicea about which John writes in his Revelation,
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.”
And then this invitation, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”
What is it you want? What is it I want?
If it is God, we can be certain that we will have all of Him we want.
And if it is anything other than God, we may very well get all of that thing.
Just please, don’t spend your life settling for mud pies. Don't be so easily pleased.
Grace and peace be upon you,
Grant