Some mornings I join friends at a local bakery. Recently they were talking about a spin off of the game Wordle. If you are not familiar it is a chance to prove how smart you are by guessing a five letter word. If you are correct it slathers accolades like "Impressive".  The new game is called  Worldle. A woman passed around a phone, looking at the outline of a country they were trying to identify. I was unable to recognize Sri Lanka. If you get discouraged you can ask for a prompt. I will probably stick closer to home, with borders I recognize. 

 

There was a West Wing episode with a scene about the globe. No one took the cartographers seriously when they suggested that the maps we grew up with are distorted. Keeping North America front and center amplifies our importance, and misrepresents the land masses at the poles. 

 

Huh?

 

It turns out that a concept that exists in the round is not easily transferred to two dimensions. Proportions suffer when they are flattened. 

 

God's messages to us are multidimensional. He is scaling back ideas like forgiveness, generosity, and compassion in the hopes that our puny minds can stretch enough to admit them. By nature we place ourselves front and center, emphasizing self importance. 

 

God invites us to love others, with examples like the woman on the verge of being stoned to death, and the man attacked on the road to Jericho. Should those precise circumstances show up for me one day I could potentially recognize it and respond. I might even stop short of hurling the rock that's gripped tightly in my palm. God willing, sanity would return in time to prompt me to uncurl my grip, dropping the stone to the ground beside the words traced by Jesus' own finger.

 

But what if instead I am clutching a hard idea, poised to use it as ammunition? When the people intending to kill the woman were convicted by their own consciences, they retreated. It became clear that they were not privy to the conversation between Jesus and the woman. I too, am uninvited to weigh in on other people's spiritual choices. I need to recognize those boundaries. 

 

Lately I feel an inner elasticity being asked of me. Can I nudge my selfish tendencies to the edges, and make room for magnanimousness? 

 

I am grateful for the chance to try. 

 

"The temptations in which a person is victorious entail the belief that all others are more worthy than he, and that he is more like those in hell than those in heaven." But when a person thinks differently than this it means that he or she has failed in the temptation, after which he or she "again comes into similar ones, and sometimes into more grievous ones, until he has been reduced to such sanity that he believes he has merited nothing." Heavenly Secrets 2273