Kim

DeHoog

Contributing Writer

Kim DeHoog is a former CBN staff contributor.

More from Kim Dehoog

A New Perspective On Familiarity

CBN.com - We’ve all been there, stuck in the everyday routine that has become like a jail, seeing the same memorized faces day after day, and secretly longing for something new and fresh. It’s a classic case of familiarity. Most people don’t like this stale feeling in their lives, but actually, when we are familiar with someone or something, it just shows how God created us to be personal, intimate, human beings. “For you created my inmost being …” (Psalms 139:13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) )

So often, familiarity breeds indifference. Growing up the youngest of 5 kids, I never thanked my parents for seeing to it that every night my entire family sat down together to eat dinner. It was an everyday occurrence that I had simply come to expect. I never asked the others about their day, never appreciated their presence. Now as I look back on those times, it means so much to me. Eating together every night established our family as a priority.

And the fundamental truth that I have learned is that when we see something, hear something, and feel something everyday, there is no way to avoid getting familiar with it. So familiar that, in fact, it gets tiresome. People in any close relationships, be it siblings, friends, or spouses, eventually deal with familiarity. We cannot always identify the source of our frustrations, but when our blood boils at the sight of a bath towel left on the floor again, we should know that’s familiarity. We get so used to each other and our behavior becomes so predictable that it exceeds the level of comfort, and instead becomes irritating.

Sometimes we even grow familiar with God. How many church services do we yawn through, thinking to ourselves, I think I heard a sermon on this subject already. We get through a passage of scripture and wonder, what did I just read? Sometimes even our prayers pick up on this attitude when we mindlessly fall back to easy phrases without really thinking.

Familiarity can be dangerous because we lose sight of the creative God that we have. When we get used to our surroundings, even bored with them, we no longer see the wonder of God. “Your mercies are new every morning”. If we take our familiarity of our surroundings and pray for a fresh, renewed perspective, perhaps gratitude can still be generated.

How can we view familiarity with new perspective? By understanding that we were created to know and be known; there is a reason for repetition and patterns. For example, if 2+2 only equaled 4 sometimes, we wouldn’t understand addition. Likewise, it is through the same patterned experiences that we understand God’s way of working. If God disciplined us differently everyday, or His love for us changed, we would never grow intimately dependent on His character. Though we may get familiar with God’s ways, it is only through that repetition that we know Him to be the unchanging God that He is.

And as for our daily lives, the things that surround us day after day are the things that will mean the most to us years later. When we imagine ourselves without one of the normal persons or places around us, when we are honest with ourselves about the everyday tools that God uses in our lives, then very often, we’ll find that God uses that which is nearest to us to teach us. If we are constantly dismissing those things with a bored wave of the hand, we miss out on too much.

God designed us specially. Now imagine if God were to get bored with the way that He has created us. What if He got tired of the way that we do certain things? What if He yawned His way through our worship? Psalms 139:3-4 You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) says,

You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you know it O Lord.

Talk about predictable! But not for one second does God get bored with us. He enjoys us. He takes immense pleasure in the way that He made us when we use our uniqueness to glorify Him.

And in order to bless Him back, we need to take stock of all of the commonplace things that He has placed around us. Take time to thank God that He is once again reminding us of those weaknesses that need to be worked on. Praise God for being the same God today that He was yesterday, and look around, really look hard, at the people around us.

Most of our lives are spent with these familiar and endearing ties. If we do not see them to be the miracles that they are, we are basically telling God that He should have done a better job of providing. We are shrugging our shoulders indifferently, and our God is such a God that one cannot know Him and be anything but different. We will be forever changed for His glory.

Love Is a Verb

I’m not sure we often view love as a choice. We are raised with a fanciful imagination sweeping us off to places where we will fall helplessly in love with someone else. Based on movies today, one might think that even if the beautiful dame resisted, it would do no good. Clearly, love has seized her and she is powerless in its grip. It is almost as if we expect love to happen to us. We are passive and waiting for the almighty force of love to smack us upside the head. But sometimes it doesn’t.

In the fall of 2003, I moved to the Dominican Republic and entered into a small community of missionaries. Having grown up in a town that barely made the map, I was used to small town ethics. Everybody knows everybody and nobody can do anything without everybody knowing. But in the Dominican Republic, I initially resisted this. I put up a wall and kept a safe distance from everyone. It looked like I loved them, but really, I just co-existed with them. Meanwhile, I waited for love to strike.

But after a while, I noticed love wasn’t flowing naturally out of me. I knew it wasn’t the fault of the incredible people around me. They were so dear to me and still are. It was my fault. I felt that God had plunked me down in a random village in the Dominican Republic with no choice but to make the best of it. And though it took time, eventually, that’s exactly what I did.

With infrequent electricity, often there was nothing to do except sit around candlelight and talk for hours at a time. It was a simple life, stripped down to the basics, and that left very little pretense. It was through these kinds of bare encounters that I learned that love does not choose us, we choose it.

Similarly, when we look at the first chapter of Ruth, we see that Ruth chose to love Naomi, even when the consequences looked bleak. If Ruth turned back and left Naomi, she would have had an easier time remarrying, which was crucial to a woman’s worth in those times. She was still young. She could have really done something with her life if she had just stayed with her own people … and that is what Naomi urges her to do. But Ruth responded:

... "Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me. (Ruth 1:16-17 But Ruth replied, "Don't ask me to leave you and turn back. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD punish me severely if I allow anything but death to separate us!" OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) NIV)

In Ruth 1:18 When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she said nothing more. OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) , we read that Naomi finally realized that Ruth was “determined”. Any lesser love would not have been enough. It took a deliberate, almost stubborn love to prove to Naomi that Ruth was serious about her commitment. Naomi was almost all the family that Ruth had left. Maybe she was not the family member that Ruth would have chosen to love, but Ruth chose to love her anyway.

We have all been put on earth together for a reason, and the difficulty of love is exactly what enables it to be so powerful. When we have no choice about who to love, love becomes harder. Perhaps we need to stop waiting for a feeling of love. The fact is, when we can’t choose the people we love, we choose to love the people we have, and that is a far richer experience. And in doing so, we reflect the love of God, who chose to love us before any of us loved Him.

1 Peter 1:22 You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters.* Love each other deeply with all your heart.* OPEN VERSE IN BIBLE (nlt) (NIV) says, “… love one another deeply, from the heart.”

This kind of love is not a noun, not an adjective, it’s a verb. It’s a very deliberate action. That is the love of our Father and the love He calls us to have for one another.