No Instructions Needed

I like to think I know what I’m doing. I’ve been setting up help alert units for people in their homes for several years now. It’s not that complicated, akin to hooking up an answering machine before phones had them built in. If it was too hard, the home health agency wouldn’t be letting volunteers like me do it.

The latest units now have an automatic step-by-step installation menu that starts talking as soon as you plug it in. It’s helpful, I suppose, for people who pick one up from the agency and take it home to install themselves. But I don’t need any directions, thank you very much, because I already know how.

“Twenty minutes,” I told the woman. “I’ll be in and out of your house in twenty minutes.”  I should have known better. To start with, it took some time to locate a second phone jack. Once that’s accomplished, it’s usually a piece of cake from there. So, I set about hooking everything up. For some reason, the tangle of wires seemed to be fighting me, but I got them plugged into their appropriate receptacles and hit the switch. Being the expert that I am, I did not want to have to go through the installation for dummies menu, so I bypassed it with a couple nifty button pushes and went ahead with the test run.  Except…it didn’t work. I unplugged everything and plugged it back in again. Still nothing. 

Only after I had exhausted all my troubleshooting tricks without any results did I finally give in. I turned the damned thing off and turned it back on again, and I let it go through the whole instruction menu. On the floor, behind the recliner, on my knees, I listened.  And it worked, just like it’s supposed to. If I had just been patient enough to do that the first time instead of trying to rush through the process, I would have saved myself from a lot of time and frustration. But I knew better, right?

This experience made me recall how my middle son would ask me questions as a preschooler. He had a lot of questions, but invariably, when I would try to give him an answer, he would tell me I was wrong. He was a four-year-old authority on every subject under the sun. Exasperated with his impertinence, one day I finally asked him, “Why do you bother to ask me if you are not going to listen to my answer?”

Why, indeed?  Did you hear that whack I got upside my head?

We love to ask questions, but sometimes we don’t like to listen to God’s answers. The disciples didn’t really want to listen, either. Jesus tells them he’s leaving and gives them final instructions, but they don’t want to hear it, just like my four-year-old and just like me. 

The cross is not the answer the disciples are looking for and isn’t what we want to hear, either. It certainly would be easier to fast-forward through the Holy Week menu, skip over the unpleasantness and celebrate Easter.  But there’s a reason for this process.  If we have the humility to listen, we might learn something.