Rules are made to be kept

The parking lot on the corner normally is filled with cars, but on this day, I turned in to see a giant swimming pool full of sparkling water, a dock attached to it, and hordes of wet dogs carrying toys in their mouth. Happy dogs were shaking water over owners and passerbys, all here for the annual Dock Dog event.

This event is a combination of aeronautics and canine show. The dogs race down a dock, and then leap into the air over the pool, and try to fly further than all the other dogs. The longest flight I watched was over 22 feet by an attack police dog. (Note to self: avoid trying to outfly attack police dogs.)

I asked the three judges how on earth they could determine how far the dog had leaped. It is so fast that I could not imagine how they could look at the measures marked along the pool side quickly enough to determine how far the dog had gone in the air.
"It is most accurately measured by the tail bubble," I was informed.
"Tail bubble?"
"When the dog lands, his measure point is at the base of the tail. That also creates a bubble in the water and so we look for where that bubble is."
This sounds remarkably imprecise to me, but I asked if it was ok if I stood with them and tried to see the tail bubble since they made it sound like an ironclad measure.
"Sure, just know we may run you over."
Why not? In the pursuit of scientific inquiry, this was a small price to pay.
So the next dog leaped and I peered over the pool edge with the 3 judges. There were millions if not trillions of bubbles, as you can imagine when a large dog leaps 20 feet through the air to land in a pool.
"Which one is the tail bubble?" I asked, but I was ignored. The judges were pointing and writing and what is even more miraculous, they came to within inches of agreement.
Risking their wrath, I asked, "How accurate do you think this is?"
"Accurate enough," they said, "At Nationals, they use special video cameras and can be more exact, but those are $50,000." One judge had a pierced chin with a clever fashion statement of pushing his beard through a ring attached to the piercing. It was like a beard ponytail.

I meandered over to another table to find out the order of events, when suddenly the people I was chatting with looked up with horror, and every one of them shrieked.
"OH they are sooooooooo out of here!" cried one of the shocked workers.
"I can't believe he did that!" yelped another. I was forgotten as all 5 of the workers were shaking their heads, pointing at the pool, and registering varying degrees of abject horror and disgust.
What had I missed? Had someone strangled a dog? What on earth had happened?
"I'm sorry," said the worker, turning back to me, "You just never ever do that."
"What did he do?"
"He threw his dog in the pool."
"That dog will never go off a dock again," said another shaking her head sadly.

Now I tried to register the same degree of horror, but actually, I could see myself throwing a reluctant dog in. I mean, they know how to swim. What is the big deal? But uniformly, the Dock dog people equated this with ripping the heart out of a living animal and taking a bite.

I remember the same degree of horror when I used the word "butt" in polite company. I was a rude Northerner, unused to the refined and genteel South when we first moved here. I was also younger and stupider. It  didn't seem like a bad word to me in the North, but it was considered uncouth clearly in the South. I try not to use that word anymore, as I don't desire to give offense when possible, but it is so hard sometimes to know all the rules. Had I been on the dock with my dog who refused to jump, I would have given him a gentle nudge. And I would have been booted from the contest, and an eternal pariah to all of Dock Dogdom. So much can hinge on knowing the rules.

I think that is why God made salvation so easy. He gave us the 10 Commandments to see how we would handle those, but almost instantly, every one of them was broken twenty times in the first five minutes. We as a species are notoriously awful at following the rules. So the Jewish religious authorities decided to add a whole bunch more rules so maybe we could walk the straight and narrow path a little more accurately. But all that created were more rules to break.  Finally, God could stand it no more and said, "Enough! You are throwing too many dogs off the dock, and what I really want you to do is let them fly on their own. So I will make it simple. Just admit you can't follow the rules, even just a few for even just a few moments. You will never be a good Dock Dog handler on your own. Admit it, and let me take over. Trust in me and let me carry away your sin. That is the only rule you need to know."

This is not a perfect analogy, but it will do for my purposes. Rules are not made to broken. They are made to be kept, but we just can't.....not with any consistency. And rather than boot us from the contest, God gives us a way to stay in it for all eternity.

John 3:15-17 (New International Version)

¹⁵that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
 ¹⁶"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

God's Spelling Lesson

I hate work sheets, fill in the blank type of questions. I think those kinds of things kill the capacity for true thinking. They require mental regurgitation, and that is a useful skill too, but in a day when every kid has an iPod in his pocket with access to the world wide web of information, it seems to me a less necessary skill than it used to be. It may also be that I am rationalizing my own inability to remember salient facts, but the point is, I am more prone to delve for deeper conceptual understanding in educating children.

And that is how we approach our daily Bible study.  Any smart kid quickly figures out that if you answer "Jesus", "prayer", or "Bible", you will likely get almost every Biblical question at least tangentially correct. I try to push Asherel to stretch for a fourth response when possible. Yesterday we were looking at a verse from Matthew 21-
"If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."

I asked Asherel what she thought the whole passage that verse was buried in meant, summarized by that verse.
She didn't answer immediately, which is an affliction I have noticed in all my kids and my husband. They all take long pauses so that I am not even sure they heard me. If I am willing to wait, sometimes take a nap or have a snack while waiting, they do almost always eventually respond but our school days are too busy to wait an hour for answers to each question.

So what I often do is jump in and frame the question more carefully to speed things along. In this case, I explained the context of the paragraph, how Jesus first is shown overturning the  tables of opportunists selling sacrificial animals in the temple itself, berating the people that His Father's house is not a den of thieves, but a house of prayer.  He then passes a fig tree, and notices not a single fig is growing on it. He rebukes the fig tree , and in an instant, it withers. He tells his amazed disciples that they could do this and more, if only they would not doubt.

"What are the main words in the verse?" I then asked Asherel.
"Believe, receive, prayer," She answered.
I was excited that we were moving at a reasonable rate through this passage. I was thinking of all the places this study could take us- what does it mean to "bear fruit" for the kingdom of God, and what is the implication and link of the withered fig tree, and of Jesus' exhortation not to doubt? Why were the stories of greed, misuse of God's temple, and the unfruitful fig all linked in the chapter of belief and receiving? Which one of these amazing conceptual flights would my brilliant daughter choose to fly today?

"So," I summarized, as I have found that is sometimes another little tool to make the interminable pauses a little more terminal, "Believe, Receive.  What is God telling us?"

"I before E, except after C," answered Asherel.

And while on first blush, this is not quite the answer I was looking for, it is not a bad answer. God does give us rules. The rules are not meant to confound us, just like spelling rules are not meant to confuse us. They are all there to help us, to guide us, to keep us on the straight and narrow path of righteousness and ...literacy. We are free to break them. But when we do, we don't bear fruit, we don't nourish the world around us, and in the end, we may as well wither away. And the key to following the Rule Giver righteously is don't doubt, trust in the one who gave us the rules that they will lead us to the place we are meant to be, and He will bring us everyplace we are meant to be. Every word that He sends us will begin to make sense and we will have eyes that see, ears that understand, and we will be healed....And I strongly suspect we will have eternally perfect spelling.

Matthew 21:21-23 (New International Version)

 ²¹Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. ²²If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."