Last week, I shared that a 2005 StatsCan study revealed 61 per cent of rural residents knew all of their neighbours, but only 16 per cent of those living in major urban centres did.
This isn’t terribly surprising. Do you have a hard time remembering names in the first place? I certainly do, even though I know I shouldn’t. Sometimes I forget the moment someone tells me…I was too busy thinking about what to say next!
But names are important. According to a Lifehacker blog post, “a person’s own name is the single most important word to him/her; it is intimately tied to his/her identity as an individual. How you deal with people’s names can have a profound effect on their impressions of you: Think about the times you’ve felt special when someone you admired addressed you by your name in a sincere tone; or think about the times when you’ve felt belittled when someone negligently called you by the wrong name, or worse, maliciously made fun of your name in front of you.”
But something so important is also so easily forgotten. Sometimes it’s physiology, since “names are among the first things to go as our brains begin shrinking — by about half of one per cent annually — starting as early as our thirties.”
People come up with all kinds of strategies for remembering names. Personally, I write the name down as soon as I can, since it helps me most to see the name in print somewhere. It works for me, but maybe not you.
Question: How well do you remember names? What strategies help you?
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Jesus said this about our needs in life, and God’s care for those needs:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7-11 ESV)
It’s a very poetic part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount, both in its beauty, but also in its depth of meaning.
Yet it’s easily misused or misunderstood. It sounds like a foolproof formula for prayer that he repeats several times. It’s easy to come away thinking God is like a vending machine – put in a prayer, make your selection, and God has to give it to you.
But simple logic says it can’t mean that. We don’t all get what we want all the time.
But Jesus was not saying God was a vending machine, he said God was like a Father. He may not be like your Father, or any other on earth, rather the Father's love is like the ideal parent, the one that all human parents are measured against.
Only a sick parent would delight in harming their child. When a child needs food – we should try to get them food. Of course, parents don’t give their child every unhealthy threat they request – good parents give healthy food and treats in moderation.
God has not promised to fulfill our wildest dreams of Porsches and Prada. He speaks about our needs…necessities. And not necessarily the modern definition of a need!
Question: How have you personally treated prayer like a formula or vending machine, or seen others do the same?
