Steve-o's Devos: This is Not What I Ordered

There is something I'd like you to think about for just a minute. When was the last time you received something different from what you expected to get? Maybe it was a meal at a restaurant, a gift, a promotion....but take a moment to recall that to mind.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to begin doing some home music recording from my piano here at home. I knew I needed some specific software to help me achieve this goal and I wanted something quite specific. Of course, I did not want to spend a lot of money on software. I just wanted an easy to use, cheap way to record music. Through the miracle of the internet, I was able to find and download something almost immediately. "Record your music in minutes" was one of the promises on the site among many others.

Oh the excitement that built up as I watched the installation take place. In literally five minutes I would have located, downloaded, and opened this new piece of software. This program would make all my hopes and expectations come true. I knew deep down inside that this would be the time saving piece I needed to realize what I had hoped to accomplish. Well, as you can expect, the easiest part of the whole process was the installation. Four days of reading manuals, trying special plug-ins for my computer, contacting the software company, and a host of work around solutions from their message board still resulted in little change. With the help of one of my musical and techno-savvy friends I was finally able to get things to work. But from within minutes of downloading this program I was saying (well at teams screaming!) "this is not what I ordered! This is not working as it should." How hard would I have to work to get something to happen that I wanted and did I have the right skills to get the job done?

Those were good questions and also moves us in to recall a little story from Genesis about Jacob. Jake one day sees a beautiful woman and desires very much to make her his wife. But his father-in-law to be, Laban, is not about to just hand his daughter over in marriage even if Jake is a distant relative. How stricken was Jake? Well, he agrees to work for Laban for 7 years in order to prove he is worthy of Rachel, this beautiful girl. What father would resist such cheap labor.

Seven years pass and soon its time for the wedding day. Jake can hardly wait. But as soon as the veil of his new bride is lifted, he discovers that he has married Rachel's older sister, Leah! (This is of course on the day after the wedding.) Now, the Bible does not say that Leah was ugly. In fact, even as crazy as Jake likely was on his wedding night, he did not notice the difference. So they must have been quite similar in the looks department. Still, it was quite a trick that Laban pulls on him. Jake awakes to discover, this is not the woman I worked so hard for! But he must strike another deal with Laban who agrees he can marry Rachel after another 7 years of servitude. Jake does and in this early tribal system is able to finally marry Rachel. That must have been one interesting family to be around.

Now I don't mean to compare marriage with downloading software off the internet, or belittle the weirdness of this story to modern ears. But there is something to be said of what we do see here. When we don't get what we want, or get something different than we expected, we have to make some important decisions. How we respond to the situation says a lot about our character and perhaps a little bit more about our faith.

I think this story is here for us to think about patience a little. I find it amusing that 14 years goes by in less than so many verses of scripture, but that suggests that there is something else intended by this story than just historical narrative of Israel's past.

Time allows us some perspective always. No matter what is going on today in our lives, we tend to forget that their are cycles and rhythms to our lives. This is always clear when we take time to talk with people of older generations who have been around a lot longer than any of us. Seven years may seem like along time, when you are 7, but when you are 70, those same years flit by rather quickly.

Sometimes we do not get what we think we wanted. And sometimes we are able to exchange the "mistake" for something else. This story is a reminder to take time to think about what we believe we need or desire and to consider if it is truly all that we think it to be. The relationships in our lives are there to see us through when life throws us a bit of a curve and when we are connected to one another we gain a perspective otherwise missing.

It is the same for those who follow Jesus. Jesus tries time and again to warn his disciples that the life they think he is talking about is not what they are going to expect. Things will be different once you follow Jesus but it will never be what you think it should be, or want it to be. Along the way though, what you thought you ordered might not have been what you needed after all....Amen.