Religion

Last night I stood in the kitchen with Chad and asked him if he thinks my brain is working okay. I had had two incidents in the past couple of days of not being able to think of simple words that I was trying to use. We faced each other by the sink, and my eyes filled with tears, and he joked and then gave me a quiz on things I should remember. The good news is that I could remember the model and make of my first car, the names of people we haven’t seen in years from our distant past, and who the president was when I was born. A few moments before, I was afraid I was losing my mind, but in true Chad fashion, he reassured me and made me laugh and proved to me that I’m not losing my memory quite yet.

About one hundred miles east of Ephesus sat a city named Colossae. It was a city encompassed in spiritual darkness, void of the true knowledge of God. Its population was made up of both Jews and Gentiles, and it was steeped in pagan mysticism, human philosophy, and the practice of magic arts. During their worship, they sought to work themselves into a religious frenzy, entering trance-like experiences that claimed to transcend the ordinary limitations of human nature.

Our four-year-old loves to sing. She comes home from church singing snippets of tunes she learned in Sunday school, and the other day she launched into a loud version of “Oh, Be Careful Little Eyes What You See.” I remember this song from my own childhood, as a simple reminder that it matters what Christians look at, what we listen to, what we say, what we do, and where we go. There’s something so sweet about hearing her singing this tune, knowing that she is actually unwittingly pointing me to a better way to live.