Today, Chambers refers to a verse where the King James uses a term, “a conscience void of offence,” and I have never heard that term. In Acts 24:16, Paul is defending himself in a speech before the governor of Palestine, Felix. In that speech, he says that, in view of his belief that he will stand before God, he tries to keep his conscience from “bumping into other stuff”; an idiom for not offending what he knows to be in agreement with his Master and other people. I worked over this phrase seeking a good English equivalent. Unfortunately, this word is not used very often in Scripture. Another problem is that is a negated form of a much older word meaning “look-out”. By the time it reached common use in the First Century Greek-speaking world, it changed around and the negated form means to be careful. I wrangled with that, the difference between the two words, and how they were not antithetical like I wanted them to be. I realized that I was listening to the wrong whisper.
See my problem? Even in the midst of seeking the meaning of the Scripture inspired by my Master I can be distracted by a false whisper. Why work so hard to find out what other translators and the context of the verse support so thoroughly? I was re-inventing the wheel, which is an activity of pride; as if I can make a better wheel. I had enough to move ahead with once I had the image of “not bumping into stuff” with a corresponding analogy of “not a bull in a china shop”. Why not stop there? Why work over the linguistic development which I have no tools to evaluate? And to what end would I do such work anyway? The word meant what it did when Paul (and Luke) used it; go with it, Stupid! But no, I had to figure it out.
Well, I didn’t figure it out. I was left with the sense that something had happened between the use in times before Jesus was born and use during the days of Paul and Luke. Again, the voice of my wife resonates in the back of my head, “so what?” And this time I had no answer.
So, in this small isolated case, what if I did become distracted by the wrong whisper, what was the harm? Not so much except that I burnt up time I could be writing for time spent researching to no purpose. This happens to me throughout my day and is the greatest sap of my time management skills. I get caught in the minutia and bogged down so much I can’t complete a task. I hate finishing, leaving a mess, and moving on. Which is fine, but if the “mess” is simply loose ends of a situation which is in essence solved, it really is just my curiosity and not really a mess at all. I call it a mess to excuse my excessive preoccupation with it. I want to know the why’s, the in’s and out’s, and who did what to whom with a fork. Who cares once the situation is resolved?
If I can learn the discipline of focus on the whisper of the Spirit of my Master in these small things, then, when big things happen, I will be ready already. Small events prepare me for the larger ones. They are practice, and, in my job, I have a lot of them. Yesterday, and the day before, I actually started to work it correctly. I had fewer bogs. There is hope for me. Today, I will increase my focus on moving to the next situation once the current one is solved. I know my manager will be pleased to know that. She’ll probably wonder why I started listening to her after all these years.
Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost For His Highest": May 13th.
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