Episode 150 - Only an Apple (or other non-specific fruit)

A long time ago, in a garden far far away, Adam and Eve ate something that God told them specifically not to. As a consequence, they got something far worse than salmonella. They sought to be like God, and in one particular (and unfortunate) way they did. In doing what God had told them not to, they chose to follow what they thought was best rather than what God thought was best, they seized the authority to determine for themselves what was good and what was bad, and with it the responsibility to suffer the consequences of those decisions. This is a (questionable) privilege the whole of humanity then inherited from them. The trouble is, that we unlike God, are not very good at it. When it comes to defining what is good and what is bad, God never gets it wrong. Us on the other hand get it wrong a lot. At this point in my life I have got quite used to this fact, along with the cycle of making mistakes, getting knocked down by them, and then dragging myself back up (with the help of God) to try again. 

 For the most part these definitions I make, I make for myself alone and so the elements from which I make this decision are simple enough. I look to my life, my needs, my thoughts, my feelings, my circumstance and I bring them to word of God written in the Bible and I pray about it asking God to guide me and do my best to make the right choices. Being for myself, these conclusions not only come just from myself, but their consequences also affect only myself. And I’m okay with that. I don’t mind paying the cost of my mistakes (although mercifully Jesus paid the true price which I could never pay). But life isn’t always so simple. Sometimes life throws people together in such a way that their choices make huge impacts on each others lives and our definitions of what is good and bad must come in equal parts from each other. That just doesn’t seem fair. How am I supposed to know what someone else is feeling or thinking, or needs, or what God is speaking into their lives? It’s hard enough working out that stuff for myself let alone for someone else. And what if we don’t reach the same conclusion, how do we reach peace about it? 

Whilst living as we do, the times that such situations occur so strongly are rare, but the difficult thing is that the more entangled or lives become the more often they arise, and God made us not for life as individuals, but as a group of people whose lives are intertwined and supporting one another. I’ll be honest, I struggle with that. Perhaps that’s why I can be so reclusive at times. And yet as hard as working out such things can be, it’s actually a much simpler question that I tend to struggle with; not what to do, but rather to do or not to do. The course of inaction always seems strongly tempting. Whether right or wrong, I always eventually seem to be able to come to a conclusion about what the best thing to do is but deciding whether or not to do it seems much more difficult. Studies have found that in a hypothetical situation in which a loose rail cart is on course to hit 5 people and certainly kill them, but where the respondent is next to a lever which would divert the cart into the path of another individual who would die instead, most people would do nothing and leave the loose rail cart on its initial course to the group of five. It’s strange, but it’s not that anyone thinks that the lives of those five people were less important than that of the individual, but rather we seem to have a misguided view that whilst we are responsible for the consequences of our actions, we are somehow not responsible for the consequences of our inaction. 

 I have to confess that I have been using you as a sounding board, so thank you for listening. I didn’t know what I was going to conclude, but I wrote it because I wanted a conclusion, not just for you but also for myself. As I’ve been writing, I have been reminded that the confidence I have in following through in what I think is right to do when I think about decisions that affect only myself is borne from knowing that I cannot find peace in myself if I don’t, and that I have the security of knowing that in God’s grace and overflowing abundance, there is nothing that I can do to stop God fulfilling His purposes for my life. I now realise that I can be confident of that truth for other people too.