Blindness

For the uninitiated traveling to, and doing business in, India can be daunting.  The chaos called traffic comes with some simple rules for survival.  Avoiding a stomach bug can be simple, assuming some basic principles are applied to every moment and each decision.  Even knowing you are going to make a deadline is possible.  Anything can be accomplished, avoided, and enjoyed if one remembers the rules.  Yet most remind blind to the opportunities open to all. 
 
Indian blindness comes from a simple conclusion which applies to far too many parts of my life.  There are simple rules.  They reflect the cause and effect relationship which exists between two events.  There is no right or wrong to the rules, they just are.  When one discusses them in isolation it seems so simple.  And yet, people get sick, traffic is overwhelming, and deadlines pass without being met.  I gave up long ago trying to understand the underlying reasons.  It is as if people just don’t believe things are that simple.  You can explain the rules, talk about the history and experience validating the relationships, and even share evidence of what happens when they are broken.  None of this matters, because people think they know better.
 
I find my approach to God follows the same arrogant yet completely na?ve lines.  I listen to seasoned advice and blissfully forget about it by the following morning.  I analyze the journeys of those I admire and fail to learn from all but a few of their mistakes.  I gain a momentary view of being in the presence of Divinity and try to recreate the experience through a new, untested, untried path of my personal creation.  It is as if I passionately want to increase my blindness, not see! 
 
There is a simple rule which explains God relationship with us and ours with each other.  “This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.”  (John 15.12)  The phrase is a clich?.  The words seem trivial.  Oh for the courage to live these words ruthlessly, completely, and thoroughly in my life.