"D" is for Distance

^"Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” 
- Matthew 26:38-39

I opened this piece with a bit of scripture that shows that even Jesus, who could command angels and demons, needed to get some distance from things at times. The notion of stopping everything to draw away to a quiet place, to think, to breath, even to pray is difficult for us to comprehend sometimes. Actually, it's something that most of us simply refuse to do, caught up as we are in the day to day hustle and bustle of our lives. There's always "something else" to get to, "someone else" to call or "another email" to respond to. 

We'll watch T.V. for two hours a night, caught up in the fantasy lives on the screen or the fortunes of one person or another on a game show, but we give little or no time to a little "peace of mind" and even less time to God. Is it any wonder that most of us are stressed, depressed, frustrated or confused? We want to know what life is all about but we don't really study the question or, worse still, the author of the subject. How can we ever know what life is all about if we don't study what life IS and who CREATED it?

If you think about it we have plenty of clues that getting some distance on things is beneficial. How many times in life have you faced a conflict, maybe at work or in a bad relationship, that just dragged on and on. People around you may have advised you to let things go or to make a change but you just couldn't (wouldn't) hear it. Then months (or years) later you changed jobs or broke-up with that bad ex.  Do you remember that feeling that came over you? Like a cloud suddenly lifting you could finally see things for how they really were. What was acutely painful to even contemplate before was now but an afterthought. "How could I let myself be treated that way? What was wrong with me?!"

What was wrong with you was that you didn't have distance, the very thing that Jesus models for us in this passage, because without distance Jesus knew you couldn't really have something else, even more important, which he modeled for us while dying on a cross....you couldn't have perspective.  Which I hope to cover tomorrow.