Eating the elephant

Remember the joke about the woman who, after procuring a delicious recipe from her neighbor, was hopping mad because it turned out awful when she mixed it up? Turned out she had been out of the ingredients and so substituted something “close enough.”

We as followers of Jesus often do the “close enough” shuffle ourselves. This weakness shish-kabobbed me this morning. I was searching for a quote by Pascal about the “God-shaped vacuum” in each of us. We all know that he or C.S. Lewis or Augustine or somebody said that. Close enough, right?

Well, Pascal didn’t say that quote. He wrote something similar but those words didn’t pop up in his Pensees. What I did learn, in my searching for the quote that doesn’t exist, is that a lot of atheists mock us for our laziness. We follow rumor and legend without investigating, and they assume that such is our faith in Jesus as well.

Want to get the Christians going? Send out an e-mail about Madeline Murray O’Hair and the believers get whipped up in a frenzy without ever checking to see if there’s an ounce of fact. We look like we believe anything.

We claim to revere God’s Word and yet we don’t memorize it accurately. We use the “close enough” shuffle to hand out holy advice and bend the text to fit either the situation or our personal bias. Do we read Scriptures enough to be accurate with them?

What we tell others, in our “close enough” stance, is that the Bible is not really worth being accurate about – certainly not important enough to sacrifice time over.

It is a tragedy that in America, where we have how many translations of the Bible sitting on our shelf, that we are bored with the Word of God, content with “close enough” quotes and hazy observations.

I’m not asking you to read Pascal today. But I am asking you to read Genesis or John or Ruth. Remember how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. We need to start eating.