Chips and challenges
A recent dinner that included chips and salsa gave me an opportunity for reflection. Imagine scooping up a chip full of salsa and biting into it – what happens? Unless you have a superpower of which the rest of us are incapable, you see the chip break in odd places. Perhaps you even see it crumble into three or four pieces that you then desperately try to corral and control before any of the salsa ends up on your shirt. Even if you are extremely careful and deliberate, it is all but impossible to bite a tortilla chip along some predetermined line and have it cooperate by breaking exactly there.
That’s what got me thinking.
Isn’t life pretty much like that? Don’t we regularly take aim at a goal on a specific timeline with a well-defined standard of excellence or, at least, completion, only to find that some of the very efforts we put into achieving the goal work against our success? Or that the process of achieving the goal undermines another value that we hold – whether time with family and friends or holding to a budget or maintaining our fitness or minimizing our screen time or….?
One dimension of faith that addresses this reality is the pattern of confession and forgiveness. Many congregations use an order for confession and forgiveness every Sunday, to address the pervasiveness of shortcomings and inadvertent harm.
The poet who wrote Psalm 16 offers a related dimension. “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places” (verse 6). The poet does not tell us where those lines fall or whether they fall where the poet would have chosen. The lines may be as jagged and haphazard and unintentionally harmful as the orneriest tortilla chip. The line is not the point, but the fact that it falls under the guidance and care and promise of God. Elsewhere the psalm declares: “I have no good apart from you…. You hold my lot…. The Lord is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken…. You will not abandon my soul to Sheol…. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
God’s constancy and faithfulness are what make the lines of the poet’s life pleasant. Those same gifts of God, received in our baptism, can give us courage to act when the way is not clear, reassurance when our best efforts go awry, and motivation to seek more fully to know and to embody God’s ways. As God’s people we have a high calling; the psalmist reminds us that we navigate those heights with God as our safety net.
