The Fence Dweller

I’ve been reading in Steve & Teri Maxwell’s book, Keeping Our Children’s Hearts. It’s been a slow process (thank you, Jill for being patient with me!) because there is just so much there to digest and I have very few hours in the day when digesting is an available activity.

Something that stuck out to me in a recent chapter was the concept of going through your home with a “pure eye”.

It is so very easy to become oblivious to the world creeping into our homes. Either everyone else is doing it or we’re tired or we just missed that one. Sometimes something we thought could be beneficial ends up being not that great and we hate to have to rethink that decision, let alone face the possibilty of needing to get rid of it altogether.

Apathy is our enemy.

When we either just don’t care or choose to avoid the really tough questions, we do ourselves no favors. The Bible is rich with examples of apathetic people and the terrible consequences that follow. It is also rich with a call to “get off the fence”.

I’m afraid lately I’ve been a fence dweller.

I inched closer and closer to that fence and then I just hopped right on it and set up camp.

Fence livin’ isn’t uncomfortable livin’ like you might think. At least not at first. If you find yourself a nice, wide patch of fence-top, you can sit there for quite some time before it gets uncomfortable.

It’s kind of like living in the middle of the road.

Depending on where you live (like my hometown), you can stand in the middle of the road for a long time before any cars come by; but if you stand there long enough, you will get run over.

The apathy that got you there, will eventually be the truck that plows you over or the wind that blows you off the fence.

Jesus doesn’t sit the fence. Jesus doesn’t stand in the middle of the road so he’s halfway between earthly things and heavenly things. He stands on one side and beckons you over. Halfway there isn’t there.

Lately, our family was engaged in a fantastic conversation about being IN the world and not OF the world and what might that look like. We ARE going to look different. We ARE going to act different. And we should EXPECT to be persecuted for it.

Are all Christians going to look the same? Are all Christians going to act the same?

To an extent, yes.

There is a standard. There are rules. What we do to express our unique identity within those rules is our perogative, but we cannot ignore the line.

When we sit the fence, we live on the line.

And someday our apathy will knock us over the line…onto the wrong side.

That’s the way of apathy. We don’t know it’s apathy until it’s already happened.

One thing about sitting on the fence is the fact that you don’t go anywhere. You just sit there. You’re not very teachable up there because someone might tell you something that would require you to get down. Most people sitting on the fence wear earplugs. It’s just easier that way.

There have been a few wake up calls this week that made me realize I needed to pull the earplugs out. I could no longer sit there and do nothing because that was the easier thing to do or because I didn’t want to deal with it. I realized just how stagnant I had become.