Looking for trouble - Devotion for 9/17/08

Looking for trouble – Devotion for 9/17/08

I remember quite vividly hearing my parents and grandparents talking about certain people who were always “looking for trouble.” Maybe it was a cousin or another distant relative, but these trouble hunters were always described in negative terms. Maybe they were always getting into bad relationships, going from one job after another, or even actually getting to know the community law enforcement folks a little bit better (frequently), I early on got the understanding that you do NOT want to be someone who is “looking for trouble.”

As I became a teenager, I began to wonder why someone wouldn’t want to look for at least a little bit of trouble. I mean, some kinds of “trouble” seemed quite intriguing, and who wasn’t at least a little bit curious about what kinds of trouble you might could find? Not looking for trouble seemed almost too stable, too much the “same old, same old,” and to be frank (even if I am Adam), too boring.

That’s why I think the mischievous part of me truly loved finding trouble in new ways! In Eugene Peterson’s The Message, he words 1 Thessalonians 1:5-6 like this: “You paid careful attention to the way we lived among you, and determined to live that way yourselves. In imitating us, you imitated the Master. Although great trouble accompanied the Word, you were able to take great joy from the Holy Spirit! – taking the trouble with the joy, the joy with the trouble.”(emphasis added) Paul is commending the new Christian servants for the way they have handled receiving the word, which truly does not come without trouble. And I feel like that same commendation needs to be offered to each one of us.

I don’t believe that the church is always supposed to be a place of peace. To paraphrase Michael Slaughter, lead pastor of Ginghamsburg UMC, I believe that in the church we need to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” To paraphrase many of the writings of John Wesley, Christianity when rightly practiced will always be met with resistance. So if everything is comfortable, if there is no resistance to what is going on, then maybe the right things aren’t going on. A church where everyone agrees all the time is a church that probably is not truly living the Word. So I encourage you today to look for trouble. Look for trouble with joy as you live in the Word, and find the ways that we can continue to imitate the Master “troublemaker.”