Two Commands

Often in life the commandments of God seem to rub against each other a bit. It is often hard to know what to do at times in life. It is why the bible always calls us to wisdom. Wisdom will show us the way when life becomes difficult.

For example sometimes tensions arise between keeping confidences of things others have said to us and keeping relationships with nosy people. You know you cannot break confidence and yet you cannot confront the nosy people asking inappropriate questions because they will not understand.

There is a delicate balance at times maintaining a balanced view of the law in certain situations. Much wisdom, thought, and prayer is required.

In a biblical example David, when he was on the run, ate bread that was only permitted to be eaten by the priests. He ate what he should not eat in general and did what was right.

Is the law in conflict? No. The bible is quite helpful in that it gives us levels of wisdom. You see there is much specific guidance and some of the specifics can come into tension in situations in life. That is why the bible gives overarching principles.

The overarching principles are that we are to love God with our whole heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. You see the bible summarizes our direction easily for us when life becomes difficult.

The bible spells out the details to aid us to learn. But when we need wisdom because of the stickiness of life we should first pray, but also fall back to the overarching principle of biblical ethics of love. If we truthfully act in love after prayer and careful thought we will not be far off.

Direction in Life

We all yearn for knowing the direction to take our lives.  Some of us know, some of us don't know, and some of us think we know and don't.

One thing about not knowing the direction we should take in life is that it is typical.  We see many of the great figures of the bible completely lost for direction.

Often many around us who are very sure of the direction in which they will take their lives end up being wrong.  Life is such that often many of the things we believe will happen don't and many of the things we don't think will happen do.

God has a plan for our lives.  This is true but most people who say it often miss the fact that God's plan may look very strange.

We see a lot of people who appear to be blown hopelessly off course who are likely on God's track and many people who look on course who are completely off track.

You see we don't see many of the details from a distance.  Often there is a great fakeness in the way things are presented.  We can really only know our story and maybe some of the story of a few close friends.

It is often discouraging because many people paint a story of their lives which is untrue.  They are successful with great happiness or so it seems.

Appearance is not always the case.  Success sometimes comes at great cost and some "success" can be built on sand that will slide away.

Always as we walk through life we live out our faith day by day.  Living each day through faith is what we can do.

We will often not know the direction to take in life and that is fine.  Some people may criticise us for lack of direction but they show their ignorance.

Having lack of direction is not abnormal.  If one does not know the way to take it is not abnormal, and it displays a lack of wisdom in people who feel that we must understand our direction.

In a way there is nothing so off track as "knowing" one's direction when one is firmly heading down the wrong path.  If we pretend to know our direction when we don't we often internalize the error and this is a flaw which a great many people live with every day.