Help!

                 Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me. (Psalm 54:4)

 

It happened again yesterday. It happens almost every day. Someone comes to the checkout counter with a cart cluttered with items. It usually happens in one of two ways. One is that the customer will start telling me how many of each specific type of plant they have. The garden center where I work charges by the container type, so their “two of this, and five of that” is really “seven three-packs.”

The other way it happens is that even after I’ve said, “Leave everything there,” they have to pull everything off the cart and put it on the counter. I then have to pick everything up that they’ve already picked up and reorganize and pack it. A third way just came to mind. I clear a section of the cart so I can put a box in the clear spot, and the customer just has to spread things out and reorganize things into the spot I’ve just cleared. And today, someone started taking things from the box of counted items and putting them up for me to count! That would have been a bad scene if I hadn’t caught her.

Yep, they’re trying to help. I understand that. Today, I had to check a wave of irritation. I wanted to say, “Get your hands off the merchandise and let me do my job!” I didn’t, but I wanted to. Instead, I thought of the times that I’ve tried to help various people who have come to do something for me, or the times that I’ve felt that I absolutely had to help God somehow.

The other thing that came to mind was the book I’m reading with my Sunday School class. Professor Willard writes that we should envision ourselves as living the way Jesus would live if He were in our shoes. Once we have the vision, we should intentionally take steps toward becoming that person according to the method or means we’ve chosen.

On the one hand, we’re told we should study to show ourselves approved, that we’re to die to ourselves, offer ourselves up as sacrifices, put on Christ, etc. Clearly, we’re to be involved. We’re not to be passive. But on the other hand, we aren’t to take God’s place in our lives. I can’t help but imagine God taking a step back, folding His arms and waiting until I stop getting in the way. In fact, there are times that I think He gives me something to pay attention to that really doesn’t matter so that I’m too busy with it to notice what He’s working on.

That all leads me back to the vision I set earlier in the spring of learning to dance with God. The point, at least at the moment, doesn’t seem to be on my taking on some big project in which I practice traditional spiritual disciplines like Bible study or fasting – though they could do me good. Rather, the point seems to be to do as I envisioned earlier this spring: to learn to dance with God. That may mean that for the next thirty seconds, I should be doing one thing, and in the two hours after that, I should be doing another. That way, I will learn to get out of His way when He's helping me.