Let’s NOT play the Opposites game!
Opposites. Supposedly they attract. I’m not sure if I really believe that but it might explain why skinny, attractive women with small woman-boobs are always throwing themselves at me. Anyway, if you have kids, I’m guessing you have played the opposite game.
Here is how it usually goes in my house. “Daddy, I do NOT love you.” Then I come up with a real zinger like, “I do NOT love you either. I do NOT want to give you a kiss.” It usually goes on like that for several hours until we are NOT having fun anymore (no..really this time, NOT an opposite NOT). I was playing the opposite game with my daughter the other night and was prepared to hear how much she does NOT love me again. Instead I got, “Daddy, you smell like beautiful butterflies.” Huh? Sweetie, we are playing the opposite game, don’t you mean that I do NOT smell like beautiful butterflies? No. Apparently my beautiful butterflies smell really bad or my daughter is finally maturing in her playing of this centuries old game.
I say centuries old because I think Paul (formerly of Saul fame) must have playing the opposite game when he wrote his letter to the Romans almost 2000 years ago. I assume he was playing it when in Romans 7:15-19 he writes, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do- this I keep on doing.”
Maybe Paul wasn’t playing the game, maybe he was just drunk. On the very off chance that he was sober and wasn’t writing opposites, what does it mean to me…and you? I mean this is Paul, writer of a ton of the New Testament. If he was struggling to do good, what in the heck kind of hope does a big fat loser like me have? Wait a minute, I can identify with what he says just a little later, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks to be God- through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Yes! If I am playing the opposite game, I’d have to say that is NOT the best hope of all!
