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Walking the Way - Exact opposite

 



Hosea 7:14

They do not cry to me from the heart,
    but they wail upon their beds;
they gash themselves for grain and wine;
    they rebel against me.

 

Thought for the day – Exact opposite

I love my kids. But every so often (read regularly) they drive me nuts. Like when I tell them to do things a certain way, and then they go and do it in whatever way they want. And when it all falls apart, they get upset because it ‘doesn’t work’ and ‘why is everything so hard.’ It’s as if they’re preprogrammed to do the exact opposite of what we want sometimes. And there’s a psychological term for this. It’s called ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ or ODD.

 

Symptoms of ODD include:

  • ·     Being unusually angry and irritable
  • ·     Frequently losing their temper
  • ·     Being easily annoyed
  • ·     Arguing with authority figures
  • ·     Refusing to follow rules
  • ·     Deliberately annoying people
  • ·     Blaming others for mistakes
  • ·     Being vindictive

Now you may think this is perfectly normal behaviour. And in a three-year-old it probably is, and actually could be an indication of healthy emotional development as they struggle with boundaries and self-awareness.. But how often are we like this with God, never mind those around us. We ask God to do something and then when it doesn’t happen in our time frame or we don’t get what we want we wail and shout. Maybe we all actually suffer from a spiritual oppositional defiant disorder. Actually, we do. It’s called sin and we all suffer from it.


This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

 

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0


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