Saturday, November 22, 2008

Shallow and Profound

"So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God."
1 Cor 10:31



Beware of allowing yourself to think that the shallow concerns of life are not ordained of God; they are as much of God as the profound. It is not your devotion to God that makes you refuse to be shallow, but your wish to impress other people with the fact that you are not shallow... Beware of posing as a profound person; God became a Baby.

To be shallow is not a sign of being wicked, nor is shallowness a sign that there are no deeps: the ocean has a shore. The shallow amenities of life, eating and drinking, walking and talking, are all ordained by God. These are the things in which Our Lord lived. He lived in them as the Son of God, and He said that "a student is not above his teacher."
Oswald Chambers - My Utmost For His Highest - November 22


Today, we took a little drive in the farmland north of us. We crossed the South Platte River at one point, and it looked pitifully puny. It's seldom roaring in our part of the state, but it was especially shallow today. Despite its looking seemingly insignificant; it joins up with the North Platte in Nebraska. Little streams continue feeding into it, and it widens and deepens until it feeds into the Missouri River just south of Omaha. It twists and turns through the state of Missouri, until it empties out into the mighty Mississippi in St. Louis; where, of course, the little trickle of water that started in the mountains of Colorado makes its way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Just as God plans for little streams to feed into rivers and eventually empty into the oceans; we, too, spend our days with little pursuits, which accumulate into a full life. Without the shallow, we never get the profound. If we aim to seek God and please God in the shallow, we shall likewise seek and please Him in the profound.

No comments: