The Categories

We see a complicated world and chop it up into smaller portions to be filed away under a label. As if life were one big episode of Jeopardy, we organize life into categories. Good Deeds for $200. Social Media for $100. Lifestyles for $500. Spirituality for $300. Medical Choices for $100. War for $400. 

Compartmentalizing is like mentally putting issues, problems, successes and even happiness into drawers where we don't have to do much with them because they are filed in their proper place. Conscience wrestling?  Conviction? Unsettled spirit? Soul sick? Put a label on it, file it away under whatever category you chose. It's that easy. "Set it and forget it" of the mind.

Or in our finite knowledge, so we would assume. 

There is a God in Heaven who is not shifted by our labels, not bound by our table of contents, who does not recognize our categorical ethics, methods and theologies. He is love. He is good. He is sovereign. In His presence our categories dissapate and only one thing remains: His Word. He has the only say. 

He created the world which we are trying to "order," or shove piece-fully into places and spaces all our own. And it's not that He doesn't care about our attempts but He sees far beyond our striving to order this life to our liking to the very core of the motive of why the ordering in the first place. He sees into the depths of every individual heart, He sees the purpose of a persons very existence--which is to love and be loved by God. And before the finger pointing, the picketing, the protests of raised fists, the display of self-indulgence to the utmost extreme, the hatred, the violence and bloodshed--there in that very individual heart was a break from the original plan. And unless we are reconciled to the Father and that break healed, that ache soothed with His very hand, we will go on living out of the deepest pain in the purpose of our heart. It will flow like a torrent out of that broken place, reach out with tentacled arms and with mechanical vigor, set to sorting chunks of reality into categories that make us feel better about the life we live, the evil we justify, the suffering we ignore, the problems we face, the pain we wish to sedate. We exhaust ourselves trying to make that pain go away by working our world into some sense. But God is not fooled. He recognizes the symptomatic ordering of the ache. He longs to stop us in our futile striving and make us whole.

We complicate with our categories. We sneer at the Pharisees of antiquity but aren't we like them when we smoosh, distort, and twist truth to fit our liking? Jesus was simplicity: love The Lord with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. The Pharisees wanted labels, titles, a category to place sin in--to place Jesus in. Jesus shirked labels at every opportunity and ministered in ways that defied human logic. He dared others to dream where they could never wish to hope. He shreds the labels we have in place over our lives, over us, and what we have placed over others. He demolishes our categories; He has the final say.

To know that His Kingdom is not of this world is to remember that our efforts to figure life out without God is futile. Our efforts to seize and squeeze chaos and happiness to fit our own logic is meaningless. Our vain attempts are exhaustive and wasteful. Turn your eyes to the One Who made you and see life with new eyes. Watch Him orchestrate the noise into it's original symphony.