There’s a guy I have known for several years, and I can say that he is my friend. When we hang out, I always enjoy the time. He’s been a blessing to me, and hopefully I have been one to him. He’s really a good guy. But there’s one thing I have noticed about him that I’ve learned to ignore (I’m sure he has a list of things he ignores about me too). He tends to exaggerate. I’ve heard him tell a story to me and then the same story to someone else and I noticed something. The numbers tend to grow with the retelling, the danger is more intense, or the food gets more delicious.
I think we all have a friend like this. In fact, it seems to be a pattern in our modern world to exaggerate. Every toothpaste can’t be dentist recommended, can it? Is every issue, from baseball to politics, as extreme as we are told? All this stretching of the truth, just to prove a point, seems to have left a lot of us numb to things that actually are as extreme as they sound. Early in my Christian walk I read a passage, John 15, got to a verse and thought, “Really? Can he be speaking literally?” In the second half of verse 5, Jesus says something incredible. Something that on the face of it, seems to be an exaggeration – “apart from me you can do nothing”. I don’t think my initial reaction was that strange. Like I said, as a culture we’ve become used to exaggerated claims and have learned to weed out the extreme and accept the rest. But, why would Jesus, the incarnation of Truth, use “nothing” instead of “not much”, or “not a whole lot”? In light of the GIC this week, what does this verse have to do with our theme – Made for This? Between now and Sunday, meditate and pray over this one little part of verse five. What if Jesus is not stretching the truth to make a point? What if the reality of our lives is summed up in these few words? What would change in how we go about our lives doing what we were made for?