Thursday, April 2, 2009

Today's Passage: Exodus 25

This story is a great reminder that instruction books for assembly have been around for a while. I am sure everyone has probably bought something, or had a “real” friend who has bought your child a gift that has those three magic words….some assembly required. The title of this chapter should be “Some Assembly Required.”

There is a joke around my house that the last place you go for instructions is the instruction booklet included by the person who designed the product and knows it better than anyone else. I am not sure if you can relate to this, but that is how I do things. However, I can remember two projects that stick out where I looked at all the pieces and then looked at the picture of the finished product and gave in. The first was a grill that I help put together for a friend which included a thirty page instruction booklet with sixty steps. The second though was the one I will never forget. It was a playhouse that Michael, Ethan and I put together. Being the young confident men that we are, we thought that we could assemble this in a few short hours even though the instructions said it was a twelve hour minimum project. Again, by our standards we had already admitted defeat by using the instruction book, and by book I think it is important to note that it rivaled Webster’s in size.

I will never forget that experience because it did take about twelve hours, and we did follow the book every step, and surprisingly enough it turned out just like the picture said it would. That project really gave me an appreciation for the designer of the playhouse and the planning that went into it. As we constructed it, sometimes it seemed that we were going out of order, at least by our “professional” opinion, but shortly after we would say that, it would make complete sense. The guy who made the instruction book knew exactly the way we should do things and the only time we ever had any problems was when we got ahead of the book.

The Israelites must have thought the same thing I did when these instructions came down. I mean they were smart people and could build an ark just fine. But then they saw the magnitude of the project and decided to follow the instructions. Here is the problem, though...when we get a huge project, we are quick to follow the manual and go step by step, but when it is a small project we just “freestyle” it and go on our own. We know the instructions are there, no matter the size of the project. We know that they are correct. Why do we choose to not use them every time, in life and in “some assembly required” projects?