The Rules

I am, by my nature, a rule-follower. Tell me that's the policy, and I'll do my best. Give me an exception to the rule, and I'll remind you what the rule is. Especially in the field in which I work, the rules are the rules for a reason (most of the time); they protect safety and dignity. 

But I'm also a logical person, so if something doesn't make sense to me, I will work diligently to prove it's a flawed system even while I continue working within it. 

So the rule is the rule...until I can prove that it's doing more harm than good and can get it changed to something better. 

I was working on a project in this vein just this week. 

Then, this morning, I was reading in 1 Samuel. 

Saul is king, and the armies of Israel are set up against the armies of the Philistines, and it's one of those stand-off type arrangements, though before the most famous one with Goliath. There's a rocky ravine and an army on either side of it and Saul's son, Jonathan, decides he's tired of all the waiting and crosses the ravine with his armorbearer and starts the fighting. Not only starts the fighting, but is decisively winning. Saul wants some of that action, and the armies mobilize, and victory is certain. 

Now, while Jonathan is away doing the actual fighting, Saul is back with the rest of his army, making silly rules. He tells them, for example, that no one is allowed to eat until they defeat the Philistines. 

It makes no sense at all to make your army weaker. God didn't tell Saul to make his army fast. Saul didn't know that the battle was already starting; he honestly didn't know when it might get actually started. He's just making arbitrary rules that he thinks sound good - nobody gets to eat. 

Then Jonathan, who is off doing the actual work, comes back into the fold of the camp and someone catches him tasting a little bit of honey that he found, and all of a sudden, Saul is ready to even kill his own son for breaking the rule. 

The rule that was not grounded in anything reasonable and that Jonathan didn't even know about because he was busy working while Saul was making policy decisions. 

And if that isn't the world we live in sometimes, I don't know what is. 

Some of us are out there working and others are sitting back making policy decisions without even thinking them through. Then, we show up in the midst of things and just do what we're doing, do what's shown to be effective, all but secure wins for our groups or families or organizations, and someone inevitably steps in and says, "Hey, you can't do that. There's a rule about that." 

There's a rule about that? That you made while I was busy doing the actual work and you all were just sitting around talking about it? A rule that you want to hold me accountable to even though I didn't even know it existed? So weird. 

Thankfully, the army came to Jonathan's defense and refused to let Saul kill him, God stepped in with mercy, and the whole army moved on. It doesn't always happen that way for us in the real world, but it does happen that way in God's world. 

So at least there's that. 

No point, really. Just something I'm thinking about right now.