SATAN ATTACKS THROUGH THE INTERNET

Satan attacks through the internet! As soon as I undertake to blog more seriously (I mean frequently – after my last post I don’t want to get misunderstood here) my server chooses to ignore all of my attempts to log on and continues to refuse me access. It has taken a week of repeated phone calls to the server, the adjustment of a number of internet settings and the downloading of a different modem driver to effect any change in these circumstances. Now I can log on and stay there for up to ten minutes without getting knocked off. They are now telling me to move my computer close to the phone connection and use a very short cable. This will place my office computer in the kitchen! I use my computer to stay out of that place!!!

My wife encourages me by saying that it should enable me to multi-task better. “But I’m a bloke!” I exclaim, “I don’t handle multi-tasking well!”

It’s true! Like most men I don’t have the connective brain tissue (women apparently have ten times as much as men) to spontaneously cope with more than one task at a time. That’s why men need secretaries, stay at home wives, and mothers. That’s why I always burn the toast and present cold coffee when making breakfast for Julie while she relaxes in bed. That’s why I get stressed out to the max when I’m trying to work at home while the kids are crying out for lunch, chocolate milk, snacks and for me to manufacture the play-dough from scratch. I can’t spontaneously and effectively complete more than one task at a time! I can’t! Not spontaneously! I have to plan for it, develop a strategy that I can follow and implement in a linear fashion until all the tasks are complete.

But that’s never good enough!!

Why? Because it doesn’t account for the inevitable interruption, the spontaneous request, the unforeseen emergency.

It’s not that I can’t handle these events. It’s just that it stresses me incredibly to do it because it forces me to throw my carefully laid plans out the window. MY plans, MY designs, MY intentions are abandoned to deal with some other issue, someone else’s problem. Hang on! Am I starting to sound a tad selfish, a touch egocentric about these things? Have I touched on a fundamental flaw in the masculine character – we don’t like to abandon our ideas, our plans because planning is not just what we do, it’s how we think?

So when Christ asks us to abandon everything and follow him that’s a pretty big ask for us blokes isn’t it? He’s asking us to abandon the plans we have been carefully formulating for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or even years to obey Him. But we’re the head of the household, the ruler of the roost, the Lord of the Manor, the Lord and Master! Aren’t we?

Not any more, not when it comes to our faith. Christ is the head of the household, our Lord and Master. We are accountable to him but he is responsible for us so the burdens don’t have to rest on our shoulders alone. Furthermore, we don’t have to stress over the tasks that have been set us because we’ve been given someone to help us achieve them, and it’s not a secretary, a stay at home wife or a mother – it’s the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit.

It’s tough being a bloke and a Christian at the same time, because we have to put our egos, our desire to control things, and our habitual way of thinking and responding in our back pocket. We have to trust in somebody other than ourselves – Christ - and, as the gender that struggles to ask for street directions after we’ve navigated ourselves into the motorist wilderness, that can be a challenging thing to do.