Can We Build a Better Mousetrap?

    How does the work of the Lord get done? Is it through tireless effort or through the Spirit Himself? I find myself working tirelessly to make things happen, I worry quite a bit, and tend to be endlessly caught up in the idea that there is a better mousetrap so to speak. That is not the best metaphor for ministry, but maybe it is telling that it is the one that comes to mind when I think about striving. The truth about Mouse traps whether they are in a family board game, a movie, or in real life the most interesting part of a mouse trap is its faulty nature. Even at its best engineering there a myriad of ways that a mouse trap can fail, but only one way it can work. So the planning, engineering, and building phases are used not to better the outcome(at its best it alwasy ends with a trapped mouse), but to limit the amount of failures it will encounter. 

    A great amount of literature, air time, and conferences are dedicated to the desire to avoid failure. We have accepted that God simply does not want us to fail, and if we do then it must be due to our own moral, character, or growth failings and we must find a way to mitigate those as much as possible. It seems odd that we would assume God's desire for our success, when God drew out and pursued so many failures in the scriptures. Some whose failure waited after their "main story" or some that never stopped failing along the way. Jacob is and continues to be one of my favorite patriarchs. It is not because of his success as a Shepherd, or a dad. It is because of his losses, his moral failures, and his idiotic decisions. He tricks, flees, gets tricked, tricks, and flees again. He is not brave when it really counts and is stubborn when yielding is the wisest course. He is a man that preferred to walk a new path while keeping his old ways in pocket. This is the man that sired twelve tribes, truly began the small nation, and became the namesake for his people Israel. Jacob is a failure and if you asked him, after he charmed your socks off he would most likely admit to as much. Yet today we still read of his struggling relationship to Yahweh.

    So let's circle back to the first question. How does the work of the Lord get done? Can we do it without Him and if not then are we doing it at all? In John 15:5, Jesus paints a picture of our corporate structure so to speak of the kingdom and it looks like this, "I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me." If we were to draw the hierarchy it would be Father at the Top along with Jesus and the Holy Spirit with every member of the church horizontal with their spoke missing and the trinity's spokes connecting to all of us and us to each other. We serve a God who brings the harvest, we are simply asked to allow Him to work on that and then join us in the harvesting process. 

    So in all of this is there actually room for failure in a real sense? Yes of course, but not in the sense that companies and organizations fail, in the sense that we fail God's expectations of us, not in our results. We are held accountable for obedience and relationship, not the outcome of our ministries. God's work is done on earth as it is in heaven and we get to be involved in the process or impede the process, but we cannot build a better mousetrap. We need only build it again and again and be faithful when there is failure and faithful when there is success. God will guide us in the process. God will use our successes and failures to prune us back and make us fruitful and tend to us and make us faithful. He makes us fruitful, not us or our habits. But we are called to participate in that process and certainly not to coach ourselves. We are called not to fail Him, not to win the world. 

There is no bench in heaven, no sidelines to watch, so get out there and play.