OLD NOTIONS

I heard a story once about practicing traditions. There was a pastor visiting one of the members of his congregation and staying for dinner.

He sat in the kitchen chatting with the lady as she prepared a ham for the meal. She took it and sliced off the edges till it was the shape of a rectangle before putting it in the pan. The pastor found this to be an unusual method of preparation and decided to ask her to explain.

She told him that she was just fixing it the way her mother had showed her, but had never asked why it was necessary to trim the edges. The mother happened to be visiting the woman and chose that moment to come into the kitchen. So the woman asked her why she had always trimmed the edges off the ham. And her mother pretty much said the same thing, she had done it the way her mother had taught her.

Well as it turned out grandma was also visiting, so both women went and asked her to come into the kitchen where they asked her to explain the logic for this preparation. Granny just smiled and said, “Oh lordy, I just did that till I finally bought a bigger pan!”

It is funny how often we do things because it is tradition and we never bother to find out the origin or reason for such tradition. And I doubt any arena of life there is more examples of unquestioned tradition than with the spiritual side of life.

If that didn’t complicate life enough when one is in church there is a whole additional layer of traditions added that are the offspring of some personal bias. I remember when I was in this one church with an abundance of long term elderly members. And for them they had a complete set of unwritten traditions on what it meant to be a Christian that wasn’t based on what the scriptures declared. Instead they were simply the result of their own opinion, but they just never admitted it.

One of these situations was with the issue of dancing. These folks had grown up in a time when dancing was associated with dance halls, which had a stigma of being a home to immoral and drunken behavior. But that had been decades earlier. The current view of dancing had nothing to do with those practices. However in the minds of those folks it was still a bad choice.

Needless to say they frown on anyone who loved to dance. Did God hate dancing? No. Did he say you couldn’t as one of the Ten Commandments or somewhere in the law? No. But you could be darn sure in the minds of these folks you were definitely acting sinful when you danced.

Old notions that inspire faith or somehow encourage are an uplifting fruit of the heart that can add to the sweetness of life. And if they are grounded in the truth of God’s word they can be even more edifying. Only God’s spirit can allow one to embrace such old notions that have their origins in the Lord’s truth. When the heart gets in the way with selfish motives then the line between reality and fiction gets hopeless blurred. I pray we will all let God fill us with the kinds of old notions that have an eternal blessing instead of a temporal value.