Rolling My Tongue Around the Edges

I love hard candy, well, hard candy that tastes good anyways. I really like mints, Worthers, those candies that are strawberry flavored and are wrapped up in strawberry-looking paper. My favorite thing about hard candy is the texture. I love rolling my tongue around the edges of the first smooth, circular candy. Then I like to crack the candy and feel the jagged, cutting pieces. I push the candy from one side of my mouth to the other. The flavor gets everywhere.

It doesn't make the candy any more nutritious. It doesn't make the candy's flavor change (except in really special candies!) It's just fun to get the texture of it.

Sometimes I think Your word is like candy, Lord. Today, I come home to read Jeremiah, and every night I kind of expect some big new piece of meat for me to digest and dig into. Something totally life changing. But often, I think You're even more interesting in GIVING OUR MINDS something to roll around.

Today, I just thought of something that You've got rolling around in my head. Right now, I'm just tasting and touching the edges of it and I don't know that it gives it significant meaning in any way. In the Old Testament, Your people really struggle with serving You only. They are falling away from You to prostitute themselves before other gods, as You metaphorically put it. But really, after they return from exile in Babylon and rebuild the temple, it seems that they kind of get this. I mean, four hundred years later when Jesus shows up the scene is one of everybody trying to figure out the best ways to follow the laws of the one Father. They get it, they aren't serving other gods. You helped them learn from history.

And yet, You still took the kingdom from them. Because they weren't loving others at all. "Even the demons believe in one God, and shudder," James says. The two greatest commandments tell the story of the whole Bible. Love You and love others. It's amazing how right You are when You said all the law and the prophets hinge on those two commandments. Sometimes we don't give You credit for how right You are.

So the balance must be held. If I don't love God and pursue other worldly "gods," I am headed for an exile punishment. Yet, if I don't love others, the kingdom will be taken from me. Lord, help this balance to be ever before me. Help me to continue to see that hanging there in the middle, doing both, is the way of the kingdom. And Lord, let that kingdom come here in my life and thoughts.

And as it provokes my thoughts, allow me to continue to feel the fascinating textures of rolling my tongue around the edges.