The other "C" word

I got up early yesterday morning and went through the motions of a daily devotion.  You know the type – you’re not quite asleep…but you’re not really awake either – and you spend more time savouring a cup of tea and “worrying” your prayers than you do enjoying real and empowering communion with God.

Somewhere amidst the stupor, I became sidetracked by a minuscule spider spinning an elaborate web inside the shade of my living room lamp.  One rarely sees such a thing – firstly because you are not looking out for it, secondly, because the light seldom shines from the right angle.  

For a few intriguing minutes, I was treated to the tantalizing spectacle of this small creature at work – here climbing, there lowering himself – occasionally branching out sideways – moving at will, effortlessly it seemed, around the lamp it had chosen to call home.

*

Later in the day, I met an old work acquaintance that I hadn’t seen for nearly 8 years.  When I last saw her, she was fellowshipping at a church in Durban.  

“Are you still going there?” I asked.  

“Goodness no!” she said, as though I had just emerged from under a rock and missed out on some major scoop.  

She is now; it turns out, a member of a fellowship that formed partly as a result of theological differences between members of her former church.  I won’t reference our conversation any further except to say she seemed at pains – (even though it was a decision she had made nearly 6 years ago) - to justify her move and insinuate that her present fellowship was better illumined and somehow more on-track than her previous one.  Or at least that’s how it sounded to me.

One of my most significant (and ongoing) lessons of the past year has been the revelation of how comparison kills.  

And by kills I mean kills outright.  

It is the basis of all judgment.  It is a journey whose inevitable destination is nothing short of a sneering and cynical religious apartheid.  It may be a gradual – even imperceptible process – but it progresses with the relentless malignance of the most aggressive cancer.  I challenge you: examine your thought patterns over the next few weeks.  If necessary, keep a little black book to record how many ways this subtle thing rears its ugly head.  You'll be amazed.

My friend was guilty of it yesterday.  And, in my own way, so was I.  As I drove away from the encounter I fumed over her arrogance. 

Why do we Christians settle for such divisive behavior when we have been purchased for so much more?  In his book, “Battling Unbelief” John Piper rightly diagnoses that it is because we have not understood the “superior pleasure of knowing God and his presence in our life.”  

“Oh God I earnestly seek you.  My body longs for you.  Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.  In you my soul will be satisfied”

Psalm 63

*

Back to the spider I had seen earlier that day.  If only I could focus on God as assiduously as that spider focuses on the business of spinning its web.  If only I could quit worrying about what others say or think.  As David writes in Psalm 131: 

“My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.  But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me”

Lord deliver me from the cancer of comparison.