daily java

Daily Java:

Open my eyes to see the wonderful truths in your instructions. (Psalm 119:18)

I have always had a couple of problems and they have had an impact on my life. One was the fact that I am restless, always looking over the next hill. I have had wanderlust most of my life.

This meant that I moved every few years or more, never staying anywhere long. I needed the new.

There is nothing wrong with that. The apostle Paul was the same way. He never spent more than three years on one place and one ministry.

But there was a problem with that. The problem is that it gave us no home.

I am originally from Texas City, TX, just over the bay from Galveston. Ella is from Houston. And we have been there some during my almost forty years of ministry. I suppose that I consider that home now. For a while, I considered home wherever I was. My home was home. Where my children were and now where my wife is is home.

But that rootlessness gave root to a second problem: I think too much. I was never one to see one side of a problem. I could always see both sides.

There is a bad problem with seeing things in only one way. The problem is that you can be wrong and not know it because you will not pursue any alternative paths. I spent a long time in a denomination that was sure it was the only one going to heaven. When I began to consider that it was not that way, I had to leave. I moved into another denomination that lived by the “our way or the highway” adage and I had to leave again.

Of course, I spent a short time in one that said all ways were equally good. I thought enough and studied enough that I knew that wasn’t true, so I had to leave. It seemed that I could not find people who agreed with me.

And I never have. I don’t know why I am cursed with this “on the other hand” mentality but I am. And Ella doesn’t always like it, but – on the other hand – she has seen a lot of stuff and been a lot of places she would not have been to if she had married that accountant, Donald, that I tell her she would have had if I had not come along.

He would have been boring and safe and she would have had a good life. For a while. I told her he probably worked for an oil company in Houston and lost his job in the oil bust of the 80’s and got caught embezzling. So she was better off with me. I have not always been smart but at least I never went to jail.

Of course, that is all in my mind. But that will teach her.

But those two things produced in me a dissatisfaction that is hard to get rid of. I am dissatisfied with where I am and I hate it when people come down with theological pronouncements from on high and consider them to be the last word. Even if a denomination votes on it doesn’t necessarily make it right.

Of course, I am not necessarily right either. But I would not be who I am otherwise. Don’t know if that is good or not, but it is so.