OBEDIENCE IS BETTER THAN SACRIFICE PRACTICE: What best describes your handling of social distancing and stay home request? Obedience or sacrifice If you have been on the journey with me of constantly seeking to reboot, rejuvenate and resurrect different aspects of my life for a while, you know that I read church signs. You also know that I think that they are fairly useless. There is a church just a couple of miles from our house that has the most useless words on theirs and the recent (they stay up for a long time as if longevity breeds relevance) reads “Obedience is better than sacrifice…” which of course is biblical but would the words bring comfort to a hurting soul or draw a lost one in? I don’t know. I look at the verbiage minimally once a day. Finally, amid all that is happening in our world, it spoke to me and had a meaning and application. Local, state and federal government are making some tall demands of us around our freedom of movement with the “stay home” order. Obedience is defined as the willingness to obey. Sacrifice is defined as the act of giving up something (sometimes begrudgingly) that you want to keep in order to a please or help someone else. Obedience to the request in this case is decidedly a better posture than sacrifice. Willingly obeying the request (I prefer to think request versus order) makes this reasonable and best option before us a more pleasant and enjoyable journey. There are those of you who are saying, “I hear you. That is why I purchased as much of everything as I could possible get and have hunkered down.” Yes, you are obedient on the one hand and sacrificial on the other.
When you helped to create the empty shelves because you didn’t want to potentially sacrifice any of your perceived necessary creature comforts, the obedience is better than sacrifice took a detour. At the other end of the spectrum are the blatantly disobedient and no thought to personal sacrifice… this would be those who are willing to offer up all the rest of humanity as the sacrifice when they don’t stay home AND empty the shelves. But of course, there are those in the middle. They have willingly and graciously managed to obey the request to stay home and venture out only when necessary. They buy appropriately. To be perfectly transparent, I have been in all three camps at some point during this odyssey. I might need to reevaluate my stance on church signs. 1 Samuel 15:22
PONDER THIS THOUGHT – Following instruction often requires sacrifice.
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