Where I’m working as a temp they have been purging documents no longer needed to be retained in the files. This has left mountains of paper that needed to be shredded. Enter the temp. Last week I probably shredded stacks of paper taller than I am. I stood at the large shredder and fed stack after stack. It wasn’t really that bad of a job. I did it during the times when I felt my brain was on overload, or I was tired of staring at a computer screen. It cleared my head and gave me time to think.
There was only one bad part, that was packing down the shreds of paper in the bag so I could fit more in. Putting my hands in that paper dried them out horribly. By the end of the week my hands were dry, scaly, and sore. Just casual contact with that paper over one week took all the goodness out of my skin. It’s taken time, and a lot of hand cream, to get back to normal.
James asks a profound question in his letter. “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?” [James 4:4 Christian Standard Bible]
The ways of God and the ways of the world are in direct opposition to each other. The world says that we are what is important. Everything must center around us. The world says we live life to the fullest by accumulating the most, experiencing the most, striving for the most.
God says that He is our Maker; He is sovereign over all His creation. He is the center of life. God says to live, we die to self. (That means we no longer regard ourselves as the center of everything.) To accumulate, we give away. To gain, we sacrifice.
As I watched my hands lose their moisture and become dry and rough just from contact with shredded paper, I thought of how my soul experiences the same thing, just by contact with the world’s ways. “Lord, keep me centered on You!”
