The Other 167 Hours

Obedience

Have you heard the word, “obedience” used lately in public discourse, not counting church? My guess is that if you have heard it, it was in the context of “blind obedience” or in some other pejorative manner.  The concept of obeying someone else runs counter to our modern sense of independence and self-direction. Find your own way! Follow your heart! Think for yourself!

Just a quick skimming of the Bible brings out passage after passage on obedience, submission, even becoming a servant to others. Ouch!  It’s almost un-American! But, obedience is a useful concept, right? Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of understanding and choosing and may even have authority issues from time to time. But, I’ve been thinking about what obedience allows us to do. As a Christian, of course, there is the specific moral duty to our Creator. Apart from that, there are some very practical benefits to obedience in general.

The first, and frankly, not the most compelling for me, is that obedience allows us to cooperate with others. The side of the street that one drives on may seem, and actually be, arbitrary. If I were the only driver in the world, I’m not sure I could reason myself into choosing one side of the street over the other. But in a world of millions of drivers, I can obey the traffic laws and get where I’m going in cooperation with the other drivers on the road, or, I can risk my life, do it my way, and probably not get where I want to go. I don’t do this obedience out of a special reverence or affection for whoever decided that the right side of the road is the correct side. I have no idea even who that person was. Life just works better when we cooperate.

A much more interesting benefit of obedience, I think, is that it allows us to accomplish things we don’t understand. It allows our work or actions to be better or smarter than we are, in a sense. It allows us to go beyond ourselves, be more than ourselves, not less.

Let me explain by talking about faith as a special type of inspired creativity, as I have in a previous post. Artists talk of being obedient to the work they are creating, allowing it to become real, to be born. L’Engle says obedience to the work allowed Bach to write better music than he could, allowed Shakespeare to write better literature than he was capable of. A work of art may even be more Christian than the artist is.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist. -walking on water

L’Engle compares this to the obedience asked of Mary by the angel. Mary was asked to give birth to something, to someone that was above and beyond her. Her obedience involved opening herself to experiences she could not have imagined, planned, or understood. Imagine how much harder that choice of obedience would have been if she really had understood all that she was being asked to do.

People we trust give us guidance, even assignments. These people may be teachers, parents, coaches. We comply because we are trying to move beyond ourselves, building something out of their understanding, not ours. We are trying to be more than what we are. God asks us to obey, to take certain actions, to live life in a certain way. It’s no good to argue that I am doing those things because I understand. I am obeying because I do NOT understand. In some cases, I am obeying so that I WILL understand.

We are all charged with creating a life. I don’t know about you but I want my life to be better than I am. I don’t want it to be limited to only what I can understand, what I can plan, or imagine. I want it to go beyond me and be more than me. I don’t think that can happen without the active ingredient of obedience to someone other than myself.