Though I have not been a father for too long, my short experience there combined with my experiences as a teacher have trained me well as practical influencer of young people’s behavior. Lesson number one in that training: Always follow through with consequences. If you say to a young man that he will have to leave the room if he speaks out again, then when he speaks out again, you must do what you said. That’s an example of plain, good people skills, and I have heard that tip in various forms perhaps a thousand times.
Unfortunately, I have also heard hundreds of times a derivative of that idea. That derivative is often projected like this: “I’ve made up my mind and that’s final.” Here the speaker – who often ends up being the father – stands firm in a course of action simply because it is the course of action he originally chose. I’m convinced our culture feels this is a character strength. Take as proof the statement – often said jokingly – that a woman has a right to change her mind. The statement is often said in jest as a response to a man who may have criticized a woman for doing exactly that: changing her mind.
While there is nothing inherently wrong about a fun teasing match where these phrases emerge, what they reveal is this: our culture thinks changing one’s mind is a “womanly” thing to do (read: a weakness for a man). A Man makes up his mind and keeps it, and that’s that.
Maybe that is what our culture has formed as right and good, but if we aspire to be like Christ, we go awry to value such archetypes. Imagine if God were so inflexible – would anything have changed after the flood? Would Lot have been saved? Would prayer be possible?
It is in the act of prayer that we most count on God’s flexibility, and as I share a passage from Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, I would ask us as fathers and believers not only to take comfort in this aspect of God’s personality and allow it to inspire us to fall to our knees in supplication and praise, but I would ask us to consider how we could better imitate such a character trait.
We should admit, I think, that some views of prayer are degrading of God, and perhaps of human beings as well. . . . But that is not so of the view of prayer that Jesus gives. To suppose that God and the individual communicate within the framework of God’s purposes for us . . . and that because of the interchange God does what he had not previously intended, or refrains from something he previously had intended to do, is nothing against God’s dignity if it is an arrangement he himself has chosen.
It is not inherently “greater” to be inflexible. That is an unfortunate human idea of greatness, derived from behavior patterns all too common in a fallen world. It turns God into a cosmic stuffed shirt. This unfortunate idea is reinforced from “the highest intellectual sources” by classical ideas of “perfection,” which stressed the necessity of absolute inalterability in God. But in a domain of persons, such as The Kingdom Among Us, it is far greater to be flexible and yet able to achieve the good goals one has set. And that is an essential part of the Divine Personality shown in the Bible and incarnated in the person of Jesus and presented in his message. So far from fitting the classical pattern of God as “the Unmoved Mover,” the God shown in the historical record is “the Most Moved Mover.” This is the One who lives with us and whom we approach from within the community of prayerful love.
May we rely upon our God – who can be moved while maintaining his purposes – and may we, by the power of his Spirit, grow to imitate him in this way.
Grace & peace to you,
Geoff
