I wrote recently about gardening and how you should not dig seeds up to see how they are doing and that you should not treat new Christians in that way either. I remembered something from my childhood which also illustrates this in a more radical way. In the Spring we used to get a jam jar and line it with blotting paper and put water in and then push a runner bean bean between the glass and the blotting paper. (For those who don't know, blotting paper is paper which absorbs liquid and holds on to it. It was used to blot handwriting written with wet ink, it absorbed the excess ink quickly without causing a mess, so that you could immediately close the exercise book.) The bean in the jar would begin to germinate and send roots down to the water, splitting the bean open. There followed a shoot going upwards which quickly turned green. This was all very fine for children to see the wonder of new life developing but the poor old bean was usually discarded. If it was thrown on the compost heap it probably had a chance of life. In many ways when God is working in someone's life we need to hold back, the process is none of our business. We should not make the new christian feel they are on display and watched at every moment, as if in a glass jar, for them to "do the right thing." New growth requires privacy.
I have written in previous posts about disasters. In the case of Concorde, decisions by people, plus other factors were directly to blame for the event. In the case of the Penlee disaster it may have been avoided if someone had made a better choice in the time beforehand and as a consequence brave men and the ship's crew and the captain and his family died. 9/11 was certainly the result of wicked men committing a terrorist act, but even in this there was heroism notably by another Cornish man, Rick Rescorla who helped many to safety and left it too late to help himself. In situations like this we see what the human spirit is capable of both good and evil. What of disasters that come on people because of the earth restless movement of tectonic plates. Often people live near volcanoes because the land is rich and fertile and they have the chance of a better life there when the volcano is resting. We cannot blame them for that but sometimes people become complacent...
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