My friend Sharon hates cats, which means, of course, that I’m always trying to find her birthday cards with cats on them. The card I found for her this year had a picture of a kitten sitting in a dog dish. The kitten’s ears are back and its eyes are wide.
The caption reads: “They dared Mittens to do it and Mittens never turned down a dare.”
When I was a kid, there was very little I couldn’t be bribed or dared into doing provided the reward involved money, books or food. I was six or seven when my parents bribed me to go down the waterslide at the town pool.
“I’ll give you a dollar,” my mom said.
Nope.
“I’ll give you two dollars,” she tried again.
Sold!
And down the slide I went even though I was incapable of floating, swimming or completing any other life saving maneuver in the water. (I should add that the plan was for my dad to catch me at the bottom of the slide.)
A few years later, I still hadn’t learned to swim and was still super tentative around the water.
“Look,” my frustrated swim teacher said, “I’ll give you a lollipop if you drown.”
I think she and I had different definitions of the word “drown” because despite sinking to the bottom of the pool a moment later, I never did get that lollipop.
Even as an adult, I’m still motivated by incentives. A few weeks ago, I attended a workshop I had some reservations about. But as soon as I sat down, the workshop presenter started passing out free books and all of sudden this was the best workshop I had ever been to!
I like to think, though, when it comes to God, incentives, dares and bribes are unnecessary.
Patty Griffin writes in her song Up to the Mountain:
“I went up to the mountain
because you asked me to.”
Her song got me thinking. How many things in my life have I done simply because God asked me to?
And the answer is … up until recently … probably not a lot.
In fact, I should probably be thankful that God no longer sends giant whales to swallow up people who run from Him like He did with Jonah.
Let’s be honest, God had to bribe me with the promise of a Narnia-themed library to get me through the doors of Hope Episcopal. Of course He knew that He had me as soon as I was in the church.
Because there have been no bribes or incentives since. And I’ve said yes to just about everything asked of me. And all I keep asking Pastor Debbie for … is more. Give me more books to read. Give me more time in church. Give me more fellowship. Give me more time in prayer. I need more. I’ve never been so spiritually hungry.
Kathleen Norris writes in Amazing Grace, “I am still amazed that having been someone who for twenty years would never willingly go to church, I have become someone who now can’t get enough of it.”
Thank goodness for those words. I’m so glad someone else feels the same way.
There will be more, I’ve no doubt, and in the end I will do whatever God asks me to do simply because He asked.
