Wednesday, March 17, 2010

What I’m Reading Today: Luke 3

On the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, my personality type is ENTJ. Each of those four letters indicates something different about my personhood. The second letter, for instance, refers broadly to the way in which I go about gathering information to make a decision. Some people are S’s – meaning they are sensory folks who gather information from facts and figures as they prepare to make decisions. N (intuitive) people like myself are different. We go by our gut instinct. We don’t like to be too tied down to facts and figures.

This way of being extends to all areas of my life – including the way I read Scripture. Often times when I get to passages that I feel are redundant or contain information that is not relevant to my life, I find myself skimming some of the material. When I get to genealogies like the one contained in today’s passage, I’ll quickly skim over it and perhaps look for a couple of names that I recognize before moving on. Or when I read about John the Baptist saying, “It’s your life that must change, not your skin” – I figure it’s a bit of overkill when he spells out what life change would look like for individuals like the tax collectors and soldiers.

Here’s where my personality type can get me into trouble. What those two items from today’s reading tell me are that Jesus’ words and his story aren’t simply some abstraction; those words and that story are rooted in the “small” details of our lives – details that help the story leap off the page and into the context of our life.

In the midst of the busyness of your life – a life filled with details – I would invite you to find time to pause and ask yourself, “In what details do I see God today?”

Til next time…