My own Maryland blizzard

I keep a Bible on my nightstand and memorize verses to fall asleep. It works pretty well, and I find I'm usually out before the job is jot-and-tittle perfect. Last night's selection was Colossians 3:12-16:

"Put on, then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. . . ."

Intertwined with this ponderous phrase by phrase assimilation was another stream of thought: "Why didn't David phone yesterday?"

The way that harmonic thread was developing was thus: "He will probably call tomorrow and will say he's sorry and that he was up against a deadline with an important project. And then I will say---in a very calm and unfrazzled manner---that I would have thought he would have been concerned for me driving home in a blizzard through Maryland and Delaware. And moreover, there are times when I have talked to him when a deadline loomed. . . . (You can see that David is hardly necessary to this conversation since I have it all mapped out already without him.)

At some point as I lay flat on my back, the two strains of internal monologue (plus Bob Dylan's "Mozambique" still stuck in my head) intersected and I could not escape a momentary embarrassment. "Compassionate hearts," "kindness," "humility," "meekness," "bearing with," "if one has a complaint, forgiving," "love," "peace," "be thankful"---all seemed to be in collision with my agenda for the next morning.

"This is different," I rebutted to myself. I would be compassionate and meek and humble and forbearing and thankful and have peace normally, but I need to go down this line of inquiry with David to make known my feelings and to know what the deal is with him. Once that's done I will resume meekness and forbearance and peace and thankfulness and forgiveness.

The unrelenting contrapuntal strain once more asserted itself: "There is no excuse clause in Colossians 3:12-16. There are no exceptions for applying these commands in cases where one has something to lose by obeying them. There is always the issue of self-protection to defeat. What's really going on here is that you want to get your own back because you don't believe God has your back if you do it his way. This, in spite of the fact that you've been praying piously every day Moses' prayer: 'Show my your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight" (Exodus 33:13).''

This, I finally perceived, is where all obedience falters---where one finds a reason why the Word of God applies to everybody else but me.

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