I read a post
recently by a young lady who alleges that the police in her town are harassing
her because they were in the alley and watched her go into her house. I don’t know all of the details of this
situation, but I am smart enough to know that no matter how flat you make a
pancake, it’s got two sides. (Thank you for the visual, Dr. Phil) This post has created a bit of the stir with
people claiming that police cannot follow you for more than three blocks,
(everything that I have researched says that the police can drive anywhere in
their jurisdiction, even if it’s behind your car), calling police vile names
and in general, displaying an attitude of disrespect. Again, I don’t know the specifics
of the situation and I really don’t care to.
I doubt that me knowing or her posting on Facebook about it will solve
any problem with the police. This did
get me thinking though.
The same day that
this was posted, I came home after dark.
As I drove down the alley, I saw two men walking. They were probably just walking, but because
my town has attracted people that may not respect human life or have mental
illnesses that challenge their ability to make good decisions, I felt a sense
of fear. I put my keys between my
fingers and quickly went from my garage to my house. I was thinking that I would have loved to
have had a cop following me and watching as I entered my house.
I think God gets
treated like a cop sometimes. We don’t like the rules. We think that we know better than He
does. We act like He’s a spoil sport
just out to ruin our fun. In reality,
just like the laws are put into place to protect us from ourselves and others,
the “rules” that God has put into place are for the same reason. However, we go throughout our day profaning His
name. We are disrespectful to Him with
our attitudes and actions. We badmouth
Him to those within earshot. Until………
Life happens. We find ourselves in situations that are
painful. We get to the end of our
rope. We experience the direct result of
our own sinful choices. That’s when all
of a sudden, we dial up the 911 line to God.
I do believe that God can use times of crisis to draw us near to Him,
but I’ve seen more times than I can count, when life gets a little better, we
forget He exists and go back to the behaviors that got us in the mess in the
first place. When things get tough
again, we blame God.
We don’t know the
whole picture. The cops that were
written about in that post may have known that there had been suspicious behavior
in the neighborhood and were assuring the safety of the writer. If something had happened to that person and
the police weren’t there, there would be posts about their incompetence at not
being there to serve and protect. It’s a
no-win situation for the police. When
God tells us in the Bible that something is wrong, we complain or just do it
anyway. If it doesn’t “feel” like He’s right there or He doesn’t do exactly
what we want when things get tough, we complain about that too.
Maybe it’s time to
grow up. Maybe it’s time for us to
realize that maybe, just maybe, we don’t know everything and that God isn’t a
911 dispatcher who we only contact in an emergency and then act like that’s a
relationship with Him.
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