First, I would like to say that yes, I do pay attention at our Tuesday morning Bible studies, and quite often I get some great spiritual depth from these sessions.
However, because I am so easily distracted, I often get side-tracked at some point along the path, and come up with things like this:
Today we had a guest speaker, a wonderful woman named Barbara who usually comes in the first Tuesday of every month. She's a joy, and it's always a blessing to have her. I absolutely love this woman's perspective on life. However, she and I think differently. I'm more into word images, she's more into physical images, and both are fine, it just means that I sometimes lose out on the profundity of her illustrations because my mind took them elsewhere.
Not sure I explained as clearly as I could, but oh well. We press onward.
This morning's illustration was about things that we hold on to. She used one of my favorite verses (Test all things. Hold on to what is good). Before we got to that verse, however, she told us to all hold out our hands as if we were holding something. We all cupped our hands obediently. She said to really make sure we had something there. Thinking literally, I tried to picture something physical, and the exercise became one in pantomime, which I realized at the time was probably not the goal, but anyway, I envisioned a small, round orange in my two hands. Then she quoted the verse above (the one in the parentheses) and asked what are the good things we hold on to. Someone said "my child," someone "the Word of God," someone "my brothers and sisters in Christ," etc. So I quickly banished the orange from my mind and replaced it with more metaphorical items like family, joy, assurance of salvation in Christ, and so on and so forth.
At least, I tried. But part of me said, "Nope, you had an orange first." And they were gone, and the orange was back.
I tried very hard to be spiritual, but there was that danged imaginary orange rolling around in my cupped hands. By now, my mind had embraced the absurdity of the situation, so then it was impossible to get properly back on track. And Barbara asked what things we hold on to that we need to let go of.
Imaginary orange.
Anyway, we eventually moved on, and the rest of the study was great and moving and encouraging.
But I'm still a little ashamed that everyone else was holding fast to the blessings of God, and I missed out because all I had in my hands was an imaginary orange.
But hey. If all God gave me in this life was an orange, you can be dang sure I would not be letting that sucker go.
