"Coached"

I bet you this situation has happened to you.  You are trying to mind the speed limit, and trying to be a safe driver. Perhaps you have a teen of drive-able age now, and you want to model for them how to drive carefully. Or, perhaps you are in no particular hurry, and just want to relax, and de-stress for a few moments alone in the car. But then, some crazy driver zooms past, careens in front of you, just in time to exit at high speeds off to the right. “You unclean offspring of a domesticated canine!” you growl.

And it has happened again. Someone or something has brought you down to your lowest base level.  You were fine, and then the driver cut you off, or your neighbor ran over your petunias, or your child mouthed off at you, or you got to class to discover that your mid-term project was due tonight and not next week as you thought. And that sets you off, and lures into being someone you don’t like to be.

I had a pastor friend who defined the word, enemy, as “anyone who tempts you to be less than who you are.”  My friends, when I get stressed out, it seems to me that I might have a lot of enemies out there.... We can be tempted into being our worse, OR we can be coaxed toward being our best.

I had such an experience last Sunday. Sitting from the balcony during worship, I was able to see a small child, sitting in the lap of an adult, who was not the parent.  But there was that adult, kissing the child on the top of the head, and moving the finger of the child along the words in the hymnbook as we were singing—guiding, showing, loving the child in a song of the faith. And for a moment, I was coaxed, or perhaps better put, coached back to being my best.

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called, ‘the children of God.’” 1 John 3:1

Dr. Chris Conver