Open Wide

Spoon feeding
In actuality, during the first part of my life I was spoon-fed probably 7% of the Bible over and over and over. Taken out of the Bible “bowl” and fed to me by caring teachers, preachers, parents, youth counselors. Heck, up until about 20 years ago, I did the feeding. Taking a popular passage or theme and neatly dicing it into manageable, tasteful bites for my adult class.
Lately though, using the lectionary to teach from, I have faced some pretty challenging passages in the Bible. Now it was tempting to take that bite-size morsel and dress it up with some new twist or take and feed them the same verse again, but I couldn’t do it. It was not the text or the verse, it is me. My tastes have changed.
At first, I would leave the verse where it lay and try to work out the surrounding scripture into some type of acceptable compliment. You know, make it behave and mean just exactly what I had always felt the central verse had always meant to me, traditionally. But that did not work. Like a cowlick in your hair, I just could not make it lay there. It just kept sticking out.
It was so tempting to sweep the tough parts under the spiritual carpet, but I could not do that either. So I served up the dish at the first of the week and just mulled it over with God. No commentaries, no former ideas, no throw down lessons from the past. Just let it sit and ferment. And it always (so far) comes out good. No better than good. God always shows me something I had failed to see before. In fact, He shows me that the best stuff is found in the hardest to reach. Like a hard pecan shell that you have to crack and then dig out the soft moist nut meat because that is the only way you can get to it. So worth the work and the wait.