Week 40—Tuesday 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
2 Corinthians 12:9-10
AFRAID OF FALLOUT
AND PRODUCING IT ALL THE TIME
We spend one more day on substitutions for the Word become flesh. I listened to an American doctor, sent to Hiroshima, Japan, to study the effects of radiation and fallout from the atomic bomb. All the time he was describing the devastating effects of atomic fallout he smoked cigarette after cigarette, apparently unconscious that the fallout in his lungs from the cigarette smoking was causing greater devastation than the fallout from the atomic bomb. It was killing more people, silently and persistently, than the bomb has ever killed and may ever kill. A cartoon in an Indian paper showed a man smoking and saying, “All this talk about lung cancer from cigarette smoking? I have made a vow to myself never to read this kind of thing again.” That vow did away with the danger, of course! It was the word of escape became vow instead of flesh. We see the spectacle of people in the West building costly bomb shelters when day by day, hour by hour a deadly fallout is taking place in their lungs.
Nearly all our major and minor upsets come from this refusal to stand responsibility. People try to escape responsibility by retreating into illness, into illusions—an escapism. A patient in a mental institution had a passion to take pictures with as small an exposure as possible. He succeeded, so he thought, when the picture was large and the exposure small. He gave away his life strategy. He was trying to withdraw from life, exposing himself to life as little as possible so life would not hurt him. He was trying to escape life—responsibility. And landing in mental and emotional upset. He was willing for the word of life contact to become word—small exposure—but not willing for it to become flesh—life participation.
Nearly all our major and minor upsets come from this refusal to stand up to life and accept responsibility. We hear sermons, read books, listen to exhortation, but these impressions never become flesh. This is the prime cause of our sense of frustration.
O God, our Father, we pray you to save us from dodging out of responsibility into unreality, into half-acceptances and half-obediences. Help us to be all-outers. For we cannot be too all-out if we obey your Son. For we are in Reality all the way, when we are in him. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: No straining at gnats and no swallowing of camels for me today.