The weather has been gorgeous lately.  Monday was almost perfect; the sun was shining, the air was warm, the humidity was low, and a gentle breeze wafted through the trees.  It was perfect kite-flying weather. And I had the perfect excuse to fly a kite. Ephram and Naomi, two of our grandchildren, are staying with us this week.  Their parents, Joshua and Bryn, are in Nicaragua visiting Traci Warner, one of our missionaries.

I took the kids to Wal-Mart to buy a kite; then headed to Sister City Park to engage in an ancient form of aviation together with my grandchildren.  The wind was constant, so the kite was airborne almost immediately.  Then something mysterious happened. The kite had attracted the attention of a hawk. Then another.  And another.  Eventually, five hawks swooped in to intercept this strange, unknown flying object.  When they saw it was just a kite, they returned to their normal pursuits.  Kite-flying reveals something about life—it is filled with mysteries.

Later on, kite-flying made another impression on me when the kite’s string became entangled with its tail.  This happened often.  So, we had to interrupt our fun and engage in the business of untangling.  Life is like that.  You have plans to enjoy life, but something happens, and everything gets tangled up.  In kite-flying, as in all aspects of life, you have to stop many times along the way and untangle the knots that inevitably come. 

We want life to be fair but it's not; we want to believe everything will work out but sometimes it doesn't.  We want to live happily ever after but things go wrong because life is all tangled up. The Bible tells us that the reason it's tangled is because we live in a fallen world and we're all fallen creatures.  And since we are fallen people living in a fallen world, we need help dealing with this fallenness; this unfairness of life.   Two basic options are set before us:  We can try to navigate our way through life with God’s help, or we can ignore God and turn to culturally contrived ways of coping with life.

As we walk through life we're all going to face a lot of tangles and we're going to encounter some mysteries, and we’re going to have to untangle some knots. That's the nature of reality.  Our culture recommends that we deal with the tangles and mysteries of life by looking for a way of escape through fantasy. Things like drinking, drugs, gambling, and pornography promise relief from the pain and boredom of life.  But engaging in these kinds of activities does not make life more satisfying.  The tangling just gets worse.  The knots increase.

For those of us who are part of the church crowd and don't want to admit that we cave into fantasy, we've adopted another one—formulas.  In the church sub-culture we've adopted the formulaic technique to help us manipulate God and control life so we won't have to face the tangles of life or live with the ambiguity of mystery. We have tons of books and videos that sell thousands of copies telling us the four steps to a more
fulfilling marriage or the five ways to living at your full potential or even, the six steps to raising perfect kids.  Here's the problem: formulas aren't biblical and they don't work. If Jesus had a formula for fixing life and making it work, he would have given it to us rather than suffering and dying on a cross for our sins.

As we walk through life we're all going to face a lot of tangles and we're going to encounter some mysteries. That's the nature of reality. But we don't want to use formulas to manage that because they're not biblical. We don't want follow fantasies because they lead to nowhere. Instead we want to seek God's wisdom and put our total trust in him.