Sunday, January 6, 2019

day no. 14,685: graydar

Hebrews 5:12-14
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food,13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Everyone knows life is full of gray. There are things which are more complicated than simple binary, black and white assessments. But what is often overlooked is that gray is a product of black and white. You can't have gray without black and white, so you can't find yourself in a gray area if there are no such things as black and white areas


All gray can be broken down into its black and white components. It could not exist without them. It either began black and some white got added in along the way or it began white and some black got added in along the way. Or its existence began as a result of a collision between particular black and white components. But in any case, gray can always be broken down. The modern tendency is to either consider gray as a fact at face value as though its existence were as substantial as something concrete like black or white OR to consider gray as a subjective mystery so beyond comprehension that only the arrogant would dare make any definitive statement regarding it. But it is not arrogant to point out that gray is made up of some mixture of black and white, rather it IS the height of arrogance to insist that it's NOT. If it is a woe to call black "white" or to call white "black," then it is a double dose of woe to do both at the same time by calling gray NEITHER "black" NOR "white," when it MUST be a bit of both. 

We live in a day where much is considered gray without considering what it must consist of or discerning how it got that way.

The world we live in is a world of ordained distinction by God which means that the ingredients for gray exist on purpose, but also that they are meant to be distinguishable and stay definable.

This kind of discernment does not come naturally, but requires CONSTANT training and practice.

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