Sometimes we get what we deserve.
Surely, you have seen a child demanding something that they weren’t ready for. They want a new toy or candy. They get red faced, pound their fist and make serious noise until they get what they want. Then they realize the toy or candy doesn’t bring the blissful satisfaction they thought it would. So they demand the next thing that they think they deserve.
The sad thing is that we never seem to really outgrow that.
We demand our rights and insist that we get our way. We want instant. We want the next big thing. We are so busy winning that we never stop to listen to wiser voices. Then we find what we thought we couldn’t live without has left us empty.
I grew up in a nation that was finding it’s voice.
We demanded our rights.
We deserved it, right?
We found ourselves and forgot ourselves at the same time.
We have shut out people who were different than us. The people who looked different than us, the people who thought different than us, they all became silent to us.
Then we cry unfair when we are left out of…anything.
We constructed our little kingdoms at the expense of kindness.
We glorified the “natural born alpha leaders” even when they became bullies. They were winners. We wanted to win.
We rewarded the winners.
We hate losing so much.
We decided to value champions over character.
We decided to make everybody a winner, participation trophies for everybody!!! After all if you never lose, you never have to get honest with yourself.
We deserve to be winners, right?
And we have defined winning as having the most.
Success became about stuff and power.
But, the truly true truth is what we REALLY need is the thing we don’t deserve…mercy.
Mercy is getting what we don’t deserve.
We only find it at the end of ourselves.
It comes from laying down our rights
Mercy comes when we realize that Jesus is for losers.
He was a little backwards, he defined winning as losing, he said the first will be the last, he said you find yourself by living for others.
It turns out that He was the true Alpha (and Omega) Male.
But we miss the point, we make our demands. We don’t realize that true life is about giving glory and not getting greatness.
As long as we are more interested in being right than redeemed we are screwed.
What if we really got over ourselves and lived the way we were designed?
But, for now…
We’ve gone and done it.
We’ve demanded our rights.
We’ve elevated ourselves.
We’ve clearly established our dominance.
We’ve drawn lines between us and them.
And now…
It seems that we as a nation are getting what we deserve.
God help us all.
carbonated joy 