Seeing what condition my condition was in
My husband grew increasingly frustrated with my insistence that his favorite shirt was black, not blue. The more I questioned his choice, the more impatient he grew. He decided to end the insanity. We were on vacation with our extended family and he, in all his certainty, decided to poll the assembly about the shirt color. He received twelve votes for black, zero for navy blue. He trusted these people. There was no history of arguments about who is right and who is wrong on the subject. He did not think I had tried to rig the jury because I had no advance knowledge of his plan to ask for feedback from the peanut gallery.
This is a loving group of people and the subsequent ribbing he received was good-natured and he was an excellent sport. Later that evening, he acknowledged that I had been right about the shirt. He explained that his eyes saw it a certain way, and he could not, “un-see it”.
Can you relate? How often has someone confronted you about your using and called it a problem? All the while, using for you seems like a solution.
In my husband’s situation, once he realized he had a problem, he asked for help. We agreed that in the future I would be given the privilege of providing feedback should he happen to choose clothes that did not match. I silently decided to do so as respectfully as possible. I could empathize with the struggle to change one’s mind about a belief that had been held so tightly all his life.
Anyone who meets a testing challenge head-on and manages to stick it out is mighty fortunate. For such persons loyally in love with God, the reward is life and more life.
Don’t let anyone under pressure to give in to evil say, “God is trying to trip me up.” God is impervious to evil, and puts evil in no one’s way. The temptation to give in to evil comes from us and only us. We have no one to blame but the leering, seducing flare-up of our own lust. Lust gets pregnant, and has a baby: sin! Sin grows up to adulthood, and becomes a real killer.
So, my very dear friends, don’t get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures.
~ James 1:12-18, The Message
One of my favorite things about recovery and faithful living is that both journeys offer the opportunity to develop the capacity for humility. My husband had to learn it in this small, seemingly insignificant example of colorblindness. But profound sacred truths are often hidden in the small and mundane moments of life. These moments CAN change our experience of life - in a beautiful, sacred way.
