Dec 30th, 2020: New Year's Wishes - Love is Inconvenient
The snowblower is helpful when there is no wind. It is dreadful when the wind picks up and goes against us. All of the snow we blow off the ground will end up sticking to our bodies. It is the quickest way to create a walking snowman.
It is indeed convenient when it works. It saves a lot of time from shovelling the snow. It helps with the back pain if we have that problem. Convenience has been our understanding of a good life. However, convenience does not always work out the best for us. It can cause more problems.
Convenient ways to get into debt are serious problems that many of us have to be aware of as we learn how to manage our finance. Credit card debt is the most damaging personal debt in North America. It is indeed convenient to use and impossible to get rid of bad habits in using them. Tapping doesn't help either.
Convenient ways to get our foods have created some other dietary challenges. We have used more chemicals in the ways we process our food than our physical body can tolerate. We now begin to see various side effects which have been the outcomes of our pursuit of convenience.
Convenient ways to get into relationships and to get out of them are more problematic than we think. Human relationships are just another commodity. We can trade it when it is no longer beneficial. Working through challenging aspects of human relationships is viewed as sacrifices and not commitments. We have lowered the foundation of meaningful relationships by allowing ourselves to have many convenient excuses.
Sometimes we treat our relationships with God the same way. We will be with Him when it is convenient and beneficial. Sometimes we are uncomfortable with the inconvenience of caring for others. We prefer creating an alignment with the powerful and the elite of society instead. The Cross is the most inconvenient way of Christian life because it calls us to die so that we might live. There is no fun in that.
1 Timothy 1: 5
"The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith."