Weekly Words

Take Your Temperature

Some time ago, a book chronicled the unique relationship that a frog has to boiling water. Place a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will immediately leap out because of the extremity of the heat. However, if you were to place the same frog into a pot of room temperature water and turn the heat up to boiling, the frog will literally sit there and boil to death.

Such is the case with so many of our lives. If we were placed into an abusive relationship, an unfulfilling job, an unrewarding career, a fruitless and unsatisfactory church, an unjust society, or a stagnant place in our personal development, then we would immediately break-up, find a new job, search for a new church, start a revolution, or make a move that might ignite our growth. However, we are usually not abruptly placed into the ruts of life in which we find ourselves. So many times we find ourselves in places that initially met our needs, fulfilled our desires, and nurtured our spirits. Then, as our environment slowly begins to change, heat up if you will, we slowly begin to lower our expectations, lessen our goals, and rearrange our priorities. Finally, we find ourselves in a boiling pot that, if we stay there, will end up being the place of our spiritual, emotional, psychological, or literal death.

On today, I want to encourage you to take your temperature. By this I mean take inventory of the environment, relationships, career, church, and/or personal place where you find yourself situated. So many of us are settling for treatment we said we would never take, dealing with people we said we would never deal with, working on jobs that are taking us nowhere, attending churches that are not facilitating our spiritual growth, apathetic to injustice and oppression, or just existing in a state of stagnancy where our personal growth now lays dormant. We are here because we have slowly, gradually, bit by bit become comfortable in boiling water. Yet we serve a God that has plans “to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future.”

And so I conclude with this prayer. “God of love and justice, initiate in us an acute awareness of our environment, stimulate us to become uncomfortable in places and with people that are unacceptable, motivate us to move into the plans you have for our life, navigate us through the wilderness of the unknown, invigorate in us an intolerance for injustice, and elevate us to the higher dimensions of your Goodness, Grace, and Glory. In the loving, liberating, and life-giving name of Jesus I pray, amen.”

Humbly in Christ’s Love,
Pastor B.A. Jackson