IKEA

The other day my wife and I made a visit to IKEA in Atlanta, a huge home furnishing type store roughly the size of 21 football fields...or something like that, to purchase a bookcase. For a guy that lives in a small country town, this place borders on culture shock.

IKEA is a wonderfully different store though. It's internationally-based, meaning that you can go to your choice of IKEAs in Belgium, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Kuwait, and around 35 other countries, yet it only has 35 locations in all of the United States. The layout of each store is both elaborate and practical. The second floor houses the showroom of basically everything they offer, already constructed and in cozy arrangements like you'd like to find in your own home, and the first floor is where you'd find all those cozy little lamps and tables and computer cabinets unconstructed and for purchase. It's the ultimate in giving the seller a true vision for what he or she could have, and then, because the store is so huge and there aren't as many store locations to keep up as say a JCPenney or Target, they can offer large quantities of nicer stuff at decent prices.

So it was with great pleasure that we settled on a nice bookcase, that will make our home that much more organized, in a matter of minutes. And then we got to looking at other stuff. You see the store layout is such that to leave the showroom you have to take a short marathon to reach the exits, because the floor has a "start-line, finish-line" design, and if you dare take a "side street" you're likely to get very lost in the abyss of Lazy Susans, kitchen devices, pillows, shelving units, vases, European-style sofas that are 2 inches off the ground, etc.

Some 50 minutes or so later we came near the end of the store, with sore feet, headaches and our pocketbooks relatively unscathed, when we encountered a large bin of inexpensive chair cushions. The price was right, the color was good and we had eight chairs around our kitchen table at home that were not only hard as, well, wood, but also had gotten scratched up a little due to use and a lack of protective covering. After a few moments our conversation went something like this:

"It a good price and who knows when we're going to be down here again."
"It will protect the chairs and...oh but, I wonder if these would be wide enough fit our chairs..."
"Oh, I bet they will. Let's just get out of here and get home."

Of course when we got home we discovered that not only were the cushions a tad too small for the chairs but they also made sitting in the chairs that much more uncomfortable. My wife and I just looked at each other with "we just got screwed" looks on our faces. The cushions only strap from the back of the chair, meaning that the front of the cushions are in a perpetual state of crookedness, like sitting with a monster wedge, and the area of the seat not covered makes your legs feel pinched. Not surprisingly, we removed the cushions from the chairs less than a day later (except for one that I guess we were too lazy to take care of), but only after removing all the tags from four of them, so they're with us forever or at least until we won't feel awful for getting rid of something we never used. The other four may never make it back to be returned either, since it's about a 360-mile round trip to IKEA and the store has a 90-day return policy.

And I find it funny that something that seemingly promised to make our lives more comfortable at an affordable price is doing quite the opposite. We're now four (or eight...time will tell) chair cushions richer and $40-something poorer and our butts are still semi-sore if we sit for too long. We're also short of space in this two-bedroom apartment, so now we also have the question of what do we do with these...things? Yes, the bookcase is nice, but the experience is tainted somewhat by our being taken by a bin of cushions. In my mind now it's sort of equivalent to training arduously for a marathon, running the first 26 miles like a champion and then taking a stop to gorge on a mammoth ice cream sundae before running the final 385 yards.

And it's silly to think that something so small as chair cushions diverted my attention and broke my heart, but there are far smaller things that distract me every day. Things that I'd be embarrassed to tell you about.

I John 2:15 says, "Do not love the world or anything in the world..."

We're not only given a command in this verse, but there's also an strong implication that our hearts will be tempted and toyed with. The world is a big store where we can seemingly get whatever our hearts desire. We will be promised comfort and security and friends and love, but the sad truth of the matter is that those promises are nothing more than houses built on sand. And they'll look really good.

What things are you distracted by right now?

Trick Question

It was once asked of me by a good friend, "how competent spiritually do you have to be to adequately lead others?"

Ah, a trick question, I could tell from the start. I knew that human adequacy had little to do with the answer, yet still, I wasn't quite sure how to answer. You see, the problem is that despite our deepest understandings of the Scriptures and our highest aspirations to godliness, we'll never actually attain adequacy, spiritually speaking.

I was reading today in 2 Corinthians, 3:5-6 to be exact, which says, "Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

Each summer I look forward to a time of refreshment, of perspective on life and what lies ahead. I expect a word from the Lord that will focus my heart and strengthen me to serve and lead the other nine months of the year, something that will rebuild my confidence in myself and my abilities to provide sound wisdom and guidance and direct someone to jump off a cliff. And oddly, I came to an understanding recently that the time of refreshment is nearing an end, and if anything, I feel less adequate to lead young men into another season.

I suppose somewhere in my thought process I had an idea that getting married and being responsible for the spiritual, as well as physical, well-being of my wife would pave the way to greater things on the road to discipling my guys. But the truth is that marriage just confirms that each day is a battle to be won or lost, and the next day you start all over again, making mistakes and learning from them.

What I'm finding out is that human competency is probably more of an enemy that a helper in the pursuit of adequacy, because the more competent or adequate I feel to lead, the less likely I am to keep up my guard and depend on the Spirit's working. In our attempts to attain adequacy through our own means we fail to recognize that we're taking the dead end path of the Law.

And that's easy to see from 2 Corinthians 3:5-6, but what's difficult to understand and keep focus on daily is what it means to live by the Spirit. Until we understand what that means and live it out consistently, our feelings of adequacy are nothing more than paper houses.