Faith Venture

Are you a “lists” person or are you a “picture” person?

I think about this duality every time I travel with my wife. If she is planning a trip where she will be driving, she wants a list.  She’ll follow that list–unless she is driving with a friend or two in the car. If they start talking (what do I mean “if”?), the distraction of talking can cause her to miss a turn. Then she must scramble to figure out how to get back on the path.

Show me a map. I want to visualize the route and burn that into my memory. I’ll make a list of the important turns, but it will always refer back to the map.

When it comes to life in the Spirit, though, what I find is there are an awful lot of people who want lists. Make it simple for us. Just give us a list of rules to follow, and life will be easy.

I think that humans have tried that. God gave Moses a list of 10 things. In many ways those 10 items were more vision about how to live than a list of things to do. Immediately, Moses began explaining those 10 items in lists of to do and not to do items. Then for over a thousand years, the people kept adding to the lists. One trouble is that it’s easy to be distracted.

Jesus called those lists a burden or a yoke. He  said we should have a vision of what a person living in the Spirit is like. How they act. What they say. How they interact with other people. They killed him. It’s easier to make lists.

This entry was posted on May 22, 2012 at 7:12 am and is filed under Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.