Sometimes Things Must Die

The connections in my brain to issues are strange.

A football manager gets sacked, I’m reminded of a song about a Grandfather’s Clock and then I’m thinking about the importance of letting things go.

If you can make a straight line through those three points, perhaps you need to see someone about that.

Let me go from the song. In my school days we sang some songs and one of them was My Grandfather’s Clock. Looking back at it now, I wonder why on earth we were singing songs like that at the age of 11. In any case I came across the song again and got real excited. I won’t be greedy and keep the experience to myself – you check it too.

The song talks about faithfulness and it also talks about the time when things end. Sometimes, though, we don’t want the thing to end, even after it’s ended for the best part of days, weeks, months or years. Some good things that helped us through an episode in life suddenly are indispensable.

Take the children of Israel as relayed in scripture. God delivers them and appoints sacred space where His presence will dwell with them. The tabernacle morphs into the temple. Soon they become so hung up on the temple that it doesn’t even occur to them that the God who gave them the temple had something far greater in mind. They get so hung up that when the Messiah actually did turn up and suggest that three days after the temple’s demolition it will be rebuilt, they freaked out.

Later when Stephen was brought in with trumped up charges of speaking against the temple, he used the opportunity to speak out. He spoke out against the people’s inability to see God, which was a historical habit. they missed it and so thought that things started and ended at the temple, when the narrative even through the Old Testament pointed to something far greater.

Some folks get hung up on traditions. The way we do meetings. The clothes we’ve got to wear. The words we say. The order of things. We get hung up on them. Attitudes, perspectives, feelings and behaviours that have been embedded for us for so long. we get hung up on them. Organisations of a local, regional, national or international nature. We get hung up on them. As though God solely uses that means of grace and nothing else will do.

Maybe it’s an individual who helped us to Christ, and then from being a channel that shows us a way to Christ suddenly they must be close to infallible. We get hung up on it, and when we’re hung up we’re left there. Things might need to change, but we refuse to change, because we’re hung up.

That calls for drastic measures. we have to know when it’s time for the thing to die. It’s not to do away with the good memories. It is to say they are memories and now the journey moves on.

When the Bible calls followers of Christ pilgrims it suggests that we’re not to get hung up with the scenery of the journey; The path is leading somewhere. To make progress in the journey some things may have to die. Some old men must die and the clocks with them.

Perhaps in their death they can leave the space that bring about the birth of something new, vibrant and certainly life-changing. Life cannot grow if the things that must die are still in the way.

Sometimes, things must die.

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden