Paradigm Shift

When I was a child, we had a game called, “Password.”  One person gives clues to their partner to get them to say a particular word.  If the game were invented today, it would have some kind of electronic prompter to reveal the secret word.  When I was a child, there were no such devices.

In the box was a stack of cards.  Printed on each card was a two-color pattern that if you just glanced at, just looked like gibberish.  If you looked harder, you could see what looked like a pattern, but it was hard to figure out what exactly it was.

Also in the box was a cardboard sleeve with a little window cut into it with a piece of transparent red plastic.  When you put the cards into the sleeve, it was magically decoded and you could easily read the words on the card.  The colored gel was the key to understanding the whole thing.

All of us approach our world with a paradigm.  We come with an understanding of how the pieces of the world all fit together.  When we see something new, we try to put it in our paradigm as best we can.

All of us, from time to time, come across things that don’t fit.  When that happens–when we find square pegs, but only have round holes–we either have to hammer it harder into the a hole into which it does not fit, or we have to reshape the holes.  We have to shift our paradigm.

As I have been working through Mark, Jesus has shifted my paradigm.  He often does.  But this one was huge.

Mark 10 deals with marriage and divorce.  I have previously understood it as Jesus forbidding divorce.  There is something greater going on here.  It is something that radically shifted my paradigm.

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2 Responses to Paradigm Shift

  1. Carol Samples says:

    Clue me in….Are you going to post the sermon for Mark 10?

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