SOAP Notes

The latest SOAP Notes entry:

August 12, 2008
Jeremiah 10-12; John 14

S: Jeremiah 10:3-8; 12-14

For the customs of the peoples are delusion; Because it is wood cut from the forest, the work of the hands of a craftsman with a cutting tool. "They decorate it with silver and with gold; They fasten it with nails and with hammers So that it will not totter. "Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field are they, And they cannot speak; They must be carried, Because they cannot walk! Do not fear them, For they can do no harm, Nor can they do any good." There is none like You, O LORD; You are great, and great is Your name in might. Who would not fear You, O King of the nations? Indeed it is Your due! For among all the wise men of the nations And in all their kingdoms, There is none like You. But they are altogether stupid and foolish In their discipline of delusion--their idol is wood!

It is He who made the earth by His power, Who stablished the world by His wisdom; And by His understanding He has stretched out the heavens. When He utters His voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens, And He causes the clouds to ascend from the end of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain, And brings out the wind from His storehouses. Every man is stupid, devoid of knowledge; Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols; For his molten images are deceitful, And there is no breath in them.

O: This section laments the people who worship false gods over the True God, but further highlights the tendency of man to put the cart before the horse, in worshipping the created over the Creator to their detriment.

A: My SOAP times are constantly annoying to me, in the sense that what I see in these verses is always a rather simple and obvious shortcoming in myself. And today I see the rather straight-forward issue of priorities. Worship, in so many ways, is a concept in the Bible that simply points out prioritization. Worship = attention = time = devotion = investment, so that when there’s discussion of worship, what it really highlights is that to which we are devoting and investing our time and attention, which in turn illustrates how we rank things in our lives.

Another annoying thing in my SOAP times is the realization that there are so few of them. It seems that my Bible reading almost exclusively consists of these SOAP periods, so as I look back and see I haven’t done a SOAP in months, it highlights just how low this exercise (Bible reading) is in my prioritization scheme.

Thinking over my last month, what has occupied my time? Noble things, like my wife and daughter and moving and work. Spending time with friends, doing favors for people here and there, reassuring clients who need someone to tell them things will be okay. But, just as often (or more often) I’m doing useless, inane, foolish, trifling things. Facebook MobWars or TV or beer drinking or reading magazines or telling stupid jokes or whatever. And both of these lists, the noble and ignoble, consist of things that are all priorities that should fall behind my God. They are all benefits that flow from him, so to worship them, or devote time to them, or pay attention to them, or invest myself in them to the exclusion of their source is ridiculous, short-sighted and wrong.

What to do? Well, the first step in solving any problem is recognizing it. The next step is addressing it. I clearly need to devote time that goes to other things (particularly the useless ones) to my God, and I need to place the noble things in their proper perspective, as things secondary or tertiary or whatever to the source from whence they came. And while appreciating them and servicing them is well and good, to look at them as being primary in importance is wrong, and I must catch myself when that occurs. To fail to address this is to invite ruin, and also to risk losing the benefits of the Creator by excluding Him from my life.

P: Lord, please help me to develop a proper value system in my life, and help me to establish priorities that reflect the correct weight of the things that I devote and invest my time and attention into. Help me to appreciate what You’ve provided without letting those things rule me, and help me to be mindful of their Provenance and to focus my attention appropriately toward You. Amen.