June 6th, 2009
The Lesson of the Tad-Frogs
If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever.
Jeremiah 7:5-7
One Sunday night a few weeks ago, the Spanish Service at our church had a picnic at a local park. Our whole family went (although most of us do not speak much Spanish!), and the kids quickly found a small swampy area filled with tadpoles. Because I try to foster their inquisitive minds, I allowed them to bring quite a few home with us. We put them in a large glass jar, filled with pond water, and began our watch of their transformation from tadpole to frog. I will admit, there have been some challenging moments like the time when Caleb brought them to the dinner table. After a very brief period of me trying to eat while watching these squirmy creatures, I demanded that they be taken somewhere where I didn’t have to watch them while trying to chew my food! This morning was another “out-of-my-comfort-zone” experience.
You see, some of them have now developed all four legs so they need some land to climb up on. Caleb has a frog habitat container, so our goal was to transfer from the glass jar to the frog habitat all of the tad-frogs (what in the world do you call them at this point in development?) that had already developed all four legs. So, if you were watching our house this morning you would have seen me fishing around in the glass jar, trying to catch the squirmy, wiggling tad-frogs. Ugh. At one point as a tiny tad-frog wiggled out of the scooper and back into the water, I gently and kindly said, “I know you are scared and think I am trying to hurt you, but really I am doing this so you can keep developing and grow. You will die if I don’t catch you.” (OK, so it might not have been that kindly and gently, but it was that basic sentiment!!) Immediately after thinking that, I remembered what I had read in Jeremiah a few days ago.
God was listing the ways in which the Israelites were not obeying him, and then he stated something that caught my attention…they disobey God “to your own harm.” Later God even states, “But am I the one they are provoking? Are they not rather harming themselves, to their own shame?” (7:19) I often focus on the reason why I should not sin is because it might hurt God’s reputation or create a division between me and God. That is true, but in these verses, God doesn’t focus on that. In fact, he seems way above being harmed by anything people do. Instead, God says that our sin will hurt us. Now, I still do think that we should be mindful of hurting God’s reputation with our actions. However, reading that verse and then dealing with the tad-frogs made me realize how often our actions really just hurt us. We may excuse our actions by thinking that we are protecting ourselves or our loved ones. We may even just be acting selfishly because we do not want change or challenge. However, our actions, if not in line with what God wants, will only bring us harm.
As I said, I didn’t really like my job this morning of personally dealing with these tad-frogs that Caleb is nurturing. However, they did illustrate the self-destructive behavior that we often find ourselves in when we turn away from how God wants us to live.