FILTERS ARE NOT ALWAYS A GOOD THING!
Robin Starbuck, Ph.D.
….. This morning, I held a brand new coffee filter in my hand and stared at it in wonder and amazement, pondering its functionality: its sheer purity and freedom from lint productibility. Coffee grounds, per se, are not for human consumption; but a cup o’ joe most certainly is – after it has been filtered through the bitter sediment. Likewise there’s a lot of stuff out there that oughtn’t be ground up and consumed by our tender, precious minds; yet we harbor many unhealthy biases in our perceptions and beliefs about God.
….. Filters can also bring major problems into our lives when they block out (filter out) wisdom and sagacious discrimination: those aforementioned pristine filters become tarnished and limp with use and misuse, kind of like reading the Bible with blinders on. Think about it for a moment and I’m sure you’ll agree that there is precious little that we can do without some preconceived notion of what’s going on. Am I right? We are so filled with surmisings, opinions, biases, judgements – our own personal perspective on how the world ought to be sliced up – that we can hardly hear the word of God thundering in our hearts!
….. Extracting these noisome filters can be a daunting undertaking: we may know the Bible fairly well, taking into account the culture and time-frame with special attention to audience relevance and yet hold fast to teachings we’ve gleaned in Sunday School. In other words, we’re just as wrong-minded as can be in our approach to hearing the Holy Spirit as we open His book!
….. We need to release our desire to figure everything out as quickly and painlessly as is humanly possible and let the Holy Spirit take over! God will teach every sincere seeker of truth in a way and time that will dazzle us and with His special touch of the miraculous! Don’t take a chance on missing out: we want Him, He wants us.
….. Let’s approach the Good Book with a renewed conviction to have our entire being shaken to the core; let’s drop off old traditional mindsets like yesterday’s newspapers! What we’re reading may have been written at least 2,000 years ago but so much has happened since then. To tell the truth, we’d have to make a concerted effort to get to the point that we can consider ourselves teachable!