Subject:  SJ: Living By or Living With |
Author:
Eugene
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Date Posted: 20:15:23 01/22/03 Wed
I wonder if there are people who can get really involved when they are assembling furniture. You know, the kind of chairs, bookcases or cabinets that you have to put together at home. For me, I don't care much about savoring the progress; I just want to have my bookcase up as soon as possible. It is the end result -- the goal -- that matters the most.
But so often I run into these instruction booklets that are printed in foreign countries. Yes, they are written in English words (assume the spellings are somewhat correct), but sometimes they just don't make sense!
I used to get really frustrated with these instructions, until one day, I actually thought about the people who wrote it. The factory was probably not a big one -- could very well be a family owned, family run workshop somewhere in Asian. They probably relied on these overseas orders to keep the business afloat, which means there was no way they would commission a professional packaging agency to design the booklets for assembly. There was probably a office worker who had taken some English classes in high school or trade school -- could very well be a child of the owner. And he/she was given the task of coming up with an English booklet teaching some people far, far away on how these merchandise should be put together. He/she must have wished that he/she did a good enough job writing the instruction up because the survival of the factory and all its workers depended on follow-up orders. These are the people that tries to make a decent living; these are the people that, with thinking much about them, we get really ticked off at when we couldn't put our bookcase together.
Okay, it is very strange for an end user to get so engaged with a simple, badly written owner's manual. I am strange. The booklet is a means to an end; and it's worth nothing once the goal is reached. You don't typically try to interact with all that's going on with the forming of the booklet.
So is the way we would have treated the Bible as merely "life's little instruction manual". If it is simply a list of do's and don'ts, then it will be weird of us to want to interact with its author -- God. We would have used the Bible as a means to an end -- to achieve perfect "Christian living". If all we have to do is to "live by the book", you'd wonder why God would make such a big deal out of it -- sending Jesus to die to give us the word?
Or perhaps the Bible is not simply an instruction manual. Perhaps it is a place where a God, who can not be figured out by human mind, chooses to reveal His unfathomable self to us. And through the process of trying to understand what is really going on in His revelation, through our daily interaction and struggle with its in-depth layers of meaning, we are in fact living with Christ and God's messengers. Perhaps, difficult as it is, our journey (how we travel) is at least as much as important as our destination (where we are traveling to).
Then, we are more than living by God's words. Then, we are living with God's words. In searching for Christ in the Bible and using our lives to interact with Him, we are then becoming His beloved.
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