Matters of Interpretation

Be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves

James 1:22

Have you ever just not wanted to do something right then?

I was sitting in my chair, doing my morning reading, snuggled in a blanket for the first time this season with my feet propped up and the little dogs in my lap, all comfy. So D. chooses this moment on Sunday morning to ask “Hey, you want to make bacon?” Which is my job, apparently. I say “No, I don’t want to eat bacon.” So about 30 seconds later she says “Well, could you make bacon for me?”

To which I responded by getting all mad and putting the dogs on the floor and throwing off the nice comfy blanket and stomping into the kitchen while she was saying “No, you don’t have to” to which I said “too late, I’m up now” and thinking something along the lines of “You will now just have to feel very bad for having had the ultimate nerve to ask me to do something that I do practically every weekend and not reading my mind and knowing that I would be seriously unwilling to do it THIS weekend since you could totally SEE that I was snuggled up with the puppies You Monster.”

So then as providence would have it the sermon in church was on James 1. “Be doers of the word and not merely hearers …”

Way to love your neighbor as yourself, Heather Anne.

Thanks for the reminder, Jesus and Pastor Cindy.

I often wonder about how far out of our way we are called to go to really “live out our faith.” But apparently I’m farther from needing to worry about that than I think, considering how much work I still have to do a lot closer to home. As in, in my home.

Where I apologized, when I got back there, for being – well, you know.

It’s not exactly a vibrant Christian witness, but we all have to start where we are.

Image: Black Gum at Chadwick Arboretum and Learning Gardens Arboretum, the Ohio State University, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons – the telltale lower branch on the black gum in the corner of our own front yard, which is always the first thing to turn red before it is even quite fall, has turned just this color. Autumn is on the horizon.