Sometimes in life you just have to be straight forward and point out the obvious that someone is missing. We have to point out the elephant in the room. We must tell people that the king has no clothes. Sometimes we even have to be willing to tell the king. Or that passing on trillions of dollars of debt to our grandchildren is immoral.
The reason this type of action is necessary in the first place is that people get comfortable believing what they believe. We tend to hang around with people who believe like we believe. We read things that reinforce our beliefs. We begin to avoid exposing ourselves to the opposition rather than engaging it.
There are reasons we do this. I think the primary reason we do this is because we want to avoid conflict, we want to get along. But Truth will rock our world. It will change the way we think, act and feel. It will make us uncomfortable. It will move us. It will make enemies. It will offend people. It will start an argument. So, we avoid it.
This can be true in families and even among close friends. We carefully navigate controversial topics to avoid those on the ‘forbidden’ list.
Jesus’ disciples had become hardened in their thinking. They had become ‘one track’ thinkers. Jesus had mentioned the religious and political leaders’ yeast. The disciples had put their minds in park and focused on physical bread. And somehow they had landed in a parking lot and thought they were still driving. They hadn’t even realized that they were missing the obvious. They thought they were still on target.
Jesus gets them to engage their brains, to put their spiritual minds back into gear and pull out of the parking lot. He does this by pointing out the obvious. He had fed 9000 people with only a few loaves and a few fish. He had proven that physical limitations like quantity weren’t limitations for Him. So He engages the disciples’ minds and spirits by bringing them back to these two events, reminding them of those moments, getting them to engage where they were parked.
When we get stuck on a belief and are unable to engage in discussion around that without anger flaring, then we have a hard heart. We have taken up such a defensive position, dug trenches and put in defensive towers, that we keep genuine seekers at bay. No one can approach us to even ask a genuine question, one that could lead them to faith, because we sit in fear of being attacked.
Find these defensive positions in your life. Take time to discover the reasons you retreat behind the walls. Learn enough to be able to hold a conversation around these topics, to give an answer about the faith we have. Be ready to state the obvious. State the Truth.
The Arnold Journey 