A Posture of Resistance

I couldn’t read the fine print from where I sat waiting for the light to turn, but I sure didn’t miss the message. “I RESIST!” shouted at me from the bumper of the car in front of me. It was almost as though whatever was being resisted was of infinitely less importance than the posture of resistance.

I RESIST!

Now, as I ruminate on it, I realize it’s not just the car or the driver in front of me that’s at issue, it’s me, too. My girlfriend tells me that I often resist what is sent my way just for the sake of resisting, because I can’t accept good coming to me. Actually, she more often says it’s just because I’m stubborn, but that’s probably the same thing. I want to do it all by myself, and I decide to resist before the offering presents itself. Could it be that I have a posture of resistance? Heaven forbid!

What you resist persists. So goes the well-worn cliché. My resistance works for me this way: I end up maintaining circumstances and situations that I really don’t want. That’s the underlying rationale for resisting in the first place. I focus on something that I don’t want. I protest, find fault, judge all else as beneath my standards, knowing that my way and only my way is right and best. And those circumstances and situations stick to me like tar.

In the process, I disallow so much good that might come to me, proud s.o.b. that I am. My failure to appreciate the good around me, to allow it to close in on me, while I am focused on having it my way does, in effect, prevent the good that I really want from ever arriving.

Hmm…so this is the way that I block the blessing that would flow to me. I sit tight in my posture of resistance.

Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow?

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow…” So begins the doxology that I sang every Sunday in my father’s church. Lying in the shadows, seeping through the words of the sermon, forming parentheses around the strains of the invitational hymn was the subtext that retribution, punishment and curses also flowed, and if I did not ‘get right with God’ the blessings would dry up, and the consequences of my sin would catch up with me in full measure.

Not my father's church

But, what if all that flows from the Divine, the eternal, the infinite is blessing? Somehow, within me, whatever name I use for this all encompassing Source, (Love, All that is, The Universe, God) I can find nothing but blessing in it. And if that be so, what is keeping me from being the beneficiary of the flow? It makes sense that it has something to do with me.

So, let me today affirm this. God is good! Her blessings are immeasurable, stocked up, waiting to be poured out! And I have a choice to face the windows of heaven, let fall away the barriers I have built around me, and allow the blessing in…first trickling through a crack in my wall, then showering me, now flooding me, until I have no option other than to swim and frolic in it’s endless flow.

Oh, is this what a heavenly choir is?

Praise Source from whom only blessing flows.