I'm a Recovering Rule-Follower

Not long ago, the team at Fishhook began the process of refreshing our company's website. As part of finding fun new ways to tell people who we are and what we do, we chose to whittle down the content on our site to be super-focused and quickly readable. One of the most dramatic examples of this was in our personal bios. The last version of our site included a page-long series of "get-to-know-me" questions and answers on each team member's personal page. In this new version, we went to just a few short phrases answering these unwritten queries: "Who am I at work? Who am I at home? Who am I in my faith?" I'll let you visit our site to see how all of us answered those questions, but I wanted to explain a little bit about my own.

I'm very much one to "follow the rules", and this plays out in many areas of my life. Certainly I try to adhere to the legal expectations we are given as a society: I want to respect those in authority, and I don't want to suffer the consequences of breaking the law. This aspect of my personality even shows up in the kitchen: my wife is a wonderful cook, intuitively combining ingredients, herbs and spices to make a delicious meal - our joke is that her chicken soup is never the same twice! But she rarely bakes, and this is where I really shine: I can follow, step-by-step, any recipe that you give me, and I will make the same pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving year after year. Not very creative, but still tasty!

So rules are a necessary and good part of life. But this adherence to rules also shows up in other areas of my life, some of them perhaps less commendable. I am very conscious of how my actions will be viewed in social situations, and I try very hard not to offend people by what I say or do. I am uncomfortable in conversations with people who have differing opinions, or in situations where my beliefs are challenged. I have very high expectations of myself, and so have -- often unreasonably -- high expectations of others. I want to make sure we're all "following the rules"... but too often, my focus is on the rules instead of the person.

Today in our little storefront church, we read and discussed the passage in the Bible where Jesus has a conversation with a Samaritan woman at the well [John 4:1-42]. Jesus starts the exchange by asking the woman for a drink of water, but quickly steers the conversation to address her true, spiritual, thirst. This woman was probably not highly regarded in her society: the passage reveals that she has had 5 husbands, and is currently living - unmarried - with yet another man. So even if the woman had not actually broken any laws, she was certainly not meeting the expectations of her highly religious society. She was not "following the rules", and was probably shunned by those around her.

The part of this story that struck me today was Jesus' interaction with her. Not only did he strike up a conversation with a woman of a different cultural region and religious sect, but he reveals to her, in language more clear than he even used with his own disciples, the he is the Messiah - the Savior.

So, rules. Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way, there is good and there is evil -- but more importantly, there is grace. There is forgiveness. Jesus knows everything about the woman at the well, good and bad. He knows how she longs for something to satisfy her thirst. Jesus doesn't ridicule her, or look down on her, or condemn her. He simply says, "I have what you need."