Obedience

Obedience is a word that has more negative than positive connotations. A person doesn't wake up and think: I just really want to be obedient and follow some orders today. Obedience makes us think of rules we felt were arbitrary as children or of classes we take our canine counterparts to learn how to come, sit, and stay. Obedience is just not part of the world's vernacular.

And, until recently, it hasn't been part of mine, either.

I've been on a journey the past year. And by journey I mean it in a sense of Odysseus trying to find his way back to Ithaca for 20 years after the Trojan War. The kind of journey where you think rest is in sight, but only to find out some idiot opens a bag of wind and blows you further away from home than when you started. Sometimes that idiot is you and sometimes its someone else. Either way it stinks.

Am I home, yet? No, because I am realizing that we are never truly home until we go to heaven....or elsewhere.

So, how do we survive this Epic that we call our lives? Well, one of the ways is being obedient. God has certain rules in place that we all know (Thou Shall Not Kill, Covet, Steal, etc) and sometimes He adds them as life goes. God tries to tell us not to open the bag of wind with rules that protect us from touching the drawstring at all. When we listen to Him, yes, we are still on a ship in the middle of an ocean, but we are headed in the right direction instead of blown off-course.

For the most part God asks for obedience in small ways. Obviously we know we shouldn't murder. For the most part we get it: don't stab someone even though it would feel good in that moment. We can see the protection in that rule: You don't go to jail and someone doesn't lose their life. Sometimes, I think we miss the biggest blessings of obedience in the day to day. God asks us for obedience in our mundane tasks more than He ever will in the big things. Its not as difficult to not steal the bag of fruit at the grocery store as it is to not judge people at Wal-Mart after 10 pm.

Recently God asked me to pray for someone that I not only severely disliked, but that I may or may not have had to consider how set on the "Thou Shall Not Kill" rule God really was. Apparently God  is pretty dead set on this. Even a small karate chop to the throat was out of the question....I asked. God asking me to do this seemed like the end of the world as saying this person's name made me cringe. But, with the helpful prayers of others, I prayed for said person. The prayer was the bare minimum: "I pray for Blank Blank." Yeah, it was that simple. I was like the five year old asked to apologize to his/her sibling when I didn't really mean it.

But, God honors our most ornery obedience.

Daily I prayed and daily the prayer became deeper and more heartfelt. Words I didn't know I had bubbled to the surface and soon enough I was praying for this person's true happiness and protection. More importantly my heart changed. I wasn't as bitter and unsettled. I had no idea how many negative feelings were harbored in my soul because of my dislike for one person.

God's obedience wasn't for this person's well-being it was for my own.

Did you catch that? God wanted me to pray for someone else so He could begin healing MY heart. This was not some silly rule He required just to feel powerful. This was an order that was given in order to save my heart that was slowly hardening. God was rescuing me from danger that I couldn't even see.

He took my childish obedience that only offered Him a whiney: "I pray for...." and turned it into a heart change. To be honest I wish I could say that I just smile when I think of this person and automatically pray for them with over-flowing joy. This is not the case. I am still human and its still a choice of obedience to pray, but the Holy Spirit works where I can't. However, I do notice when bitterness and hatred wells up inside of me for this person. I notice it and I can give it over to God instead of dwelling on it.

What small thing is God asking of you?