COLD

Up till several years ago I had been overweight most of my life. And I never could stand hot weather. I love it when it was cold. I used to even go around wearing a short sleeve shirt even in the winter and almost never wore a jacket unless it was raining.

Then I had a life-threatening bout with pneumonia and was diagnosed with diabetes. I was forced to change my lifestyle and did. When one changes to eating right and exercising you naturally lose weight. And the good news was for me that my blood sugar returned to normal and has stayed that way since I still maintain that same lifestyle.

What I didn’t anticipate was the radical change this would have on my ability to deal with colder temperatures. These days the heat is something I enjoy and the cold something I dread. I find myself after a life time of enjoying things like air conditioning suddenly being chilled to the bone by air that once I savored.

I don’t mention this to necessarily make comment on the issue of health or temperatures. But more because of how sometimes in life a given change can have far more vast affects on one’s life than we could ever imagine.

And just with me and how I have had to adjust to a radical change in my reaction to my environment, so to there are times when following the Lord can bring impacts to parts of our life will be effected we never thought was possible. The question is whether we are willing to accept such consequences.

In my case for example with my change in reaction to my environment I understood that the environment hadn’t changed, just my tolerance of what before didn’t bother me. Yet at times I think as Christians when our spiritual metabolism changes in terms of what we view and feel is important, we expect others to change too.

Which can be a problem if the other person didn’t have the same change in their system or view of life. And without that change why would they relish doing anything different?

It just seems too often we forget that. When the awareness of what is displeasing to God touches us for the first time, it can be like my sudden reaction to the cold being so different after years. If we have a conscience and heart to please him we naturally want to avoid those things even if in the past we embraced them.

And to live one’s convictions is I think to be faithful to the Lord. However to expect everyone else who doesn’t have the same experience to change isn’t. It would be like in my case if just because I couldn’t handle the cold I expected everyone else to feel the same. Instead I just put on a jacket these days when in an air conditioned room. I make be chilled to the bone, but I don’t get up and demand everyone else has to suddenly do likewise when they don’t feel that way.

So when the Lord touches and we feel cold towards some given behavior that didn’t bother us before, put on the jacket of faith, but don’t expect the world that isn’t bothered by the same problem to do the same. Who knows they might actually come to see it that way if you don’t keep shoving a jacket in their faces!