This morning at camp I showed the campers a really cool blue Lego Race Car Kit that I bought. I told them that my plan is to assemble it by shaking it in the box and demonstrated several shaking techniques. I even passed it through the audience letting the kids help me assemble it through shaking.
I’m hoping by the end of the day it will be fully assembled inside the box so that I can just take it out and show the kids the completed car.
But some think I’m crazy. They are telling me that the car had an inventor who first envisioned the car – then designed it – and that the box contains detailed instructions on how to put it together. Sounds superstitious to me!
I let them know that sounds great, but I heard that our world came together randomly and by chance. It couldn’t be that Someone invented it, designed it, assembled it and made instructions on how we should then live! It just took millions of years of randomness for all this order to finally appear.
So, by the same logic, if I just shake the Lego box enough times it should assemble itself. No need for a design or a plan. Plain ‘ol randomness will do. We’ll see by evening chapel if my Lego race car is assembled, or if I will have to accept that for there to be something with intricate design, there must be an intentional Designer as well. Or maybe I’ll need to keep shaking it all week long?
Gotta go, I need to get back to shaking my lego box! Can’t wait to see the completed car!
UPDATE: (the next day)
I introduced the “Shake to Assemble” in the morning chapel – let the kids see me shaking it all day as I roamed around camp, and by evening chapel dramatically opened the box… only to discover it was not assembled after all. Turns out random chance isn’t how to put a Lego kit together. And while I only shook it for one day – the consensus was that even shaking it for a million years wouldn’t help. It came with instructions from the creator that need to be followed.
The Next Day.
So, I showed up at morning chapel the next day (this morning as I write this) with the car looking like this:
It was a mess. The wheels didn’t turn, the front half kept falling down and overall, it looked nothing like the design on the box. What went wrong? Well, I explained that I got tired of the tedious instructions which were obviously designed to spoil my fun and make me miss out on something exciting, and besides, I’m a Lego expert, “I don’t need instructions!” The result was not pretty.
But the same happens in life. There is a picture and design of what God intends for us and it’s good (Jeremiah 29:11) and even beyond our imagination! (I Cor. 2:9) But many people miss out on it, because they think God’s Instructions (the Bible) will spoil their fun, or they think they don’t need God’s commands… they can live their life their own way. And the results, are often not pretty.
So I committed to do it the Lego Instructions way today. In fact, at lunch time, I sat in the lunch room working on it. I commented constantly, “This doesn’t look like a car!” and the kids told me, “It will! Stick with it!” Or I’d comment, “I can do this faster my own way,” and they’d say, “You tried that, remember?” Finally, I finished it and discovered it even has a pull back action and can fly over ten feet on its own power!
The kids kept saying, “See? It’s better when you follow the instructions!” Making my point for me! Life is better when we follow God’s Instructions!
As an extra bonus, this morning’s lesson was on self-control (which I lacked when it came to building the car, and they saw the result!) and tonight’s lesson is on patience/perseverance – which I needed in order to complete this sweet car: