The Simplest Things

A momentous event happened last night.  Derek got his first pair of shoes with real shoelaces instead of velcro straps.  They were on sale and had one of his favorite TV characters on them, Perry the Platypus.  It was love at first sight.  But now we have to teach him to tie shoes.  Ugh.

Tying shoes is a simple thing.  You've done it for years, maybe decades, without even thinking about it.  But you know what?  It ain't simple when you're learning it.  Derek's all eager to figure it out but I'm at a loss how to teach him.  We've got the first step down:  make an "X" with the two laces, tuck one lace under the bridge of the "X", then pull both laces tight.  Easy.  But how do you describe how to make the loops?  I know exactly how to do it and so do you.  But I can't write out the instructions for those loops here and I bet you can't either.  Go ahead!  Try it!  I'll watch the comment section.  I bet it'll take you multiple sentences and even then the description won't be adequate.  It's just one of those things that you can do intuitively but that you can't teach intuitively.

Of course this experience is bringing back my own lessons in shoe-tying when I was Derek's age.  We've all forgotten it after 92,000 laces tied, but back then learning to tie your shoes was the equivalent of differential calculus.  You just had to do it and do it.  It just wouldn't work until the point that it did...somehow.  Once you got it, you got it, but darned if you could explain it to anyone else.

This reminds me of our faith journey, learning about God and such.  There's no pocket instruction booklet that will tell you everything you need to know in order to "do the God thing".  There's plenty of repetition, frustration, struggle.  It doesn't work and doesn't work until the day that it does...somehow.  But darned if you can tell anybody else how or why.

It's also a reminder that we need to be slow, gentle, and understanding when people ask us about our faith or want to explore their own faith with us.  The basics of faith seem simple to us because we've repeated them a thousand times.  We tie our God shoes without remembering the steps (and frustration) of how we learned to do it.  But what's intuitive to us is calculus to someone who's brand new, searching for their faith.  If we try to rush them through that part to get to our vaunted conclusions (whatever those may be) we'll only end up ruining the experience.

This is especially true since many people start their faith journey trying to find the answer to horribly complex questions.  "What happens when we die?  Why does God let people suffer?  What are heaven and hell?"  No easy answers present themselves, nor should they.  Trying to give speedy answers to those questions in our quest to share faith is the equivalent of throwing shoes and a coat and hat on them and shoving them out the door saying, "Come on!  We've got to get to the market!"  Nobody learns anything about tying technique that way. Instead they learn that faith is about getting to a particular destination as quickly as possible.  As soon as they find any flaw in that destination--or simply want to go somewhere else instead--their faith is done.

If we're patient with people as they unlock the wonders of shoe-tying, however, they'll find they can walk anywhere at any speed with those shoes on.  The faith journey isn't about arriving at a certain place, it's about girding yourself up and exploring.  The simplest things taught (and lived out) with patience do more good than the most complex answers delivered quickly.

Sometimes we define our faith goals as "getting new members in church" or "getting people to believe like I do" or even "getting everybody to agree".  A more faithful definition might be just being with people where they are, even if that's looping one lace under the other for the 100th time and having no idea how to explain the next step.  The smallest, simplest things often matter most if we just have the patience to see it.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)