I drive the speed limit.
And I don’t like opening a package of crackers in the supermarket to feed my kids. There is something in me that needs to pay for them first.
I’m a rule follower. I think it was bred into me. Which is why my three years of breaking all the rules were so out of character for me. At least for my personality.
I’d begun to press against the rules that I’d been raised with and in my blindness, seeing no immediate consequences, I questioned the validity of the rules.
Don’t drink.
Don’t flirt with men who aren’t my husband.
Don’t lie.
Don’t…
Nothing horrible was happening (yet) so what was the big deal?
The rule follower in me didn’t become a rule-breaker; she became a rule-questioner. I wasn’t breaking anything if there wasn’t anything real to break because the rule only seemed real if their was a consequence. My Evangelical upbringing had taught me that doing things like drugs or having sex before I was married would land me somewhere between hell and a really crappy life. Here I was married and having an adulterous affair and nothing really bad was happening. The consequences I thought would fall like an executioner’s axe weren’t falling.
What I’d failed to realize was that I shouldn’t do those things NOT because of the consequences (because in all truth, much of our life is lived without physical consequences) but because doing what was wrong would break relationship with God, and then eventually others.
It was about relationship. Not about the rules. Because in the right relationship a person doesn’t really need rules.
Let’s just call it the rule of Love. Jesus called it the Greatest Commandment.
If I love God and if I’m concerned about my intimacy with Him, then the more I want to please Him. The more my life will look like a person who is in Love with their Creator. And the more I will live in ways that are righteous and are in line with what we consider “rules”. I’ll need the rules less as a rigid law because I’m focused on pleasing Him (and running everything through that filter). I will begin to do those things naturally that bring me closer to Him.
The same goes with my husband. The more I love him, the more I want to be the right kind of wife and all the rules of submission and boundaries we’ve put in place (although important) begin to fade in light of my love for him. They aren’t nearly as important as how much I want to show him how much I love him today.
Rules? All of the other rules hang like a hat on a hook of the rule of Love.
What do you think? Are you a rule follower or a rule breaker?
