I find myself on a Saturday morning counting out my pills for the next week prior to restocking the weekly supply. Do I count the pills out one by one? No! Do I put them immediately from the pill vial into their section of the box? No! I arrange them in two groups: one of 3 pills and one of four... just as I was taught over 70 years ago in Grade One by Mrs Dawson. How many other things, I wonder, do I do a certain way because that’s the way I was taught as a child?
1 Corinthians 13:11 ran through my mind. “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.“ So for the next few days my mind was busy considering just how many of those ‘ childish things’ still were part of my life. We might have grown up in a house where alcohol was used to excess, where violence was a way of life, or where those who looked or sounded different were denigrated. That is no reason for us to repeat those things as adults.
We often hear the remark that someone has a ‘Sunday School’ mentality. And I ‘m sure we have all had, at one time or another in our lives, the response, “What’s wrong with that?” As a young child in Sunday School I remember quite vividly hearing the story of Jonah and the whale with the help of a flannelboard. So what you ask? This particular set of flannelboard pictographs showed an electric light bulb hanging above a wooden table inside the whale! As an adult my reason tells me that picture was not true.
For some reason, those things we learned in Sunday School and church during our early years tend to stagnate. We forget that we were given a child’s view of the Bible, a view that as it says in the passage from 1 Corinthians should be put away and replaced with an ever-changing and mature view through our adult years. It behooves us to take a long, hard look at just what our beliefs are in the present moment. What they are doesn’t really matter as long as they aren’t exactly the same as they were 6 months or a year ago.
Taking a course called 'Difference'...Be Curious...Be Present...Re-imagine...which fits in with this blog, Lynn. It is about changing habits and quite revealing about the pitfalls we allow ourselves to fall into, quite unwittingly...from old patterns of thought. Good practice as we ease our way into a different world discovering 'Beauty for Ashes.' Thanks again for your thoughts!
ReplyDeleteJudy Imrie