My wife and I were talking a few weekends ago, and she came up with one of the best analogy’s on people and their walk with Christ that I have ever heard. She compared people’s relationship with Christ to that of our relationship with a firefly. Follow me as I walk through the steps and concepts that she talked about.
First we have the phase we chase after the firefly / Christ. We are enamored and want to attain / contain it. We are consumed by the chase, we pursue it, we chase it, we run after it, we yell, we scream and we stumble but nothing stops us from going after our goal. We have lived to this point without it, but no longer can we can live without the firefly / Christ. Finally after a lot of work and frustration we realize how to simply attain what we want and we capture the firefly / Jesus.
Once captured we quickly put the firefly / Christ into a container where we can study and watch it. We make sure that there are a few holes, none to big though as we do not want them to get out /escape the world we created. We add a few things of interest to the jar, again nothing to big where there is no risk of escape into the outside world again. We want the firefly / Christ safely contained within a safe environment we created and control.
Once securely captured, and contained ,we become enthralled with it. We watch, we look, we gaze, and we study deeply. Our life is engrossed in all things related to the firefly / Christ. Ever so often we shake the jar to be sure it is still alive and active, but basically we just watch and study the firefly / Christ. Remember - No direct interaction or contact because we may damage the firefly / Christ and the fragile eco system that we created for it. Direct interaction and contact can only lead to a change in the relationship, and that is not what we want. We want to define and contain the firefly / Christ as we see fit.
Finally we become bored with the firefly / Christ because after a brief intense time of study we find nothing new now, and nothing seems to be changing now. At this point, we begin to just ignore the firefly / Christ. No longer do we study the life of the firefly / Christ, we just allow it to linger in the corner of our world. Sure it was our focus for a time, but that time has passed now. We have new or different things in our life now, those things now enthrall us. The jar / created world that contains the firefly / Christ just collects dust.
Eventually, we come back across the jar and we decide to let the firefly / Christ go as it is no longer of use to us. We are so different now, and that is from so long ago. How can such things from our past even relate to us today? Sure we had a good time with the firefly / Christ. We even had a lot of great times. Sure our life was mesmerized for a time by it, but in the end we simply became bored with the firefly / Christ. We became bored with the little world we created for the firefly / Christ. It is now time for both us and the firefly / Christ to move on. So, we let the firefly / Christ go where they can go “entertain and change” someone else’s life somewhere else as we just do not need them any more. No harm no foul, they had a good time and so did we, but the time for us to separate is now.
We never see that we did nothing to deepen / develop the relationship. We never see what we ignored, what we missed, what we failed to grasp, or what we lost. We never see that the world we created was not the one that they were suppose to live in, but the one that we built for them out of selfish motives We never see that we were creating rules and standards that they had no say so in. What we see is that the relationship is no longer what we want. We never see what we missed out on or where we went wrong.
What we see is that the relationship has became boring and trite by our standards. We see that the world that we created for them is boring to us and we are not willing or able to take the time to expand it. We think we are doing the right thing by letting the firefly / Christ go to touch another. To us it is no harm no foul, never seeing the real loser in the deal was us.
Something to think about as we move toward the Christmas season.
