Stop Roughing the Kicker

It’s college football season, so if you’re not a football fan, please forgive my analogies, that follow.  So, a few football fouls, against the defense, which are relevant to my musings herewith are: “roughing the kicker,” “roughing the passer,” and “pass interference.”

While the offense is just doing their job, fouls perpetrated by the defense, such as contact, holding, pulling, tripping, hands to the face, or cutting off legally, offensively intended movements, are illegal and against the rules of the game.  Roughing the kicker is clearly a defensive ploy.

Surely, you’ve never been defensive, and rebelled against the rules that life has handed to you.  Or, you’ve never put off the unpleasant inevitables of life, by avoiding the rules put into place by the powers that be.

Have you ever been the receiver, blocked from doing what you want to, by pass interference?  Maybe you then found yourself raucously opposing the seemingly unfair rules of the game of life?

I’m reminded here of a form of bucking the system, referred to in the biblical book of Acts as “kicking against the goad.”  This was a literal agrarian concept of using a slender piece of timber sharpened to a point, to prod stubborn oxen into motion.

I don’t know if you’ve had any real-life experience trying to move a large farm animal when they don’t want to move, but I have.  I found myself at the mercy of one or two large rams which did not care to go in the direction they should have and needed to go.

When a stubborn animal foolishly kicks against that sharp goad, it can cause itself unnecessary injury and pain.  Isn’t it frustrating to find yourself unable to explain to that “dumb animal,” that it is in their best interest to move where you are directing them?

In fact, as is often the case in biblical literature, most text is a metaphor for you and me.  When Jesus said, when referring to the goad and the stubborn oxen, he was really speaking to self-willed, headstrong people, “You are only hurting yourself by fighting me.”

It’s often painful at first when we’re goaded into the right direction.  But kicking against the goad only increases the pain.  If we could just make peace with our direction in life and go with the flow for a time, perhaps the good in the new or the change will yield a surprisingly pleasant reality.

Jesus exercised compassion toward the oxen, aka the stubborn human when he said “it is hard for you.” Rebellion is a hard path.  It’s more painful than the path of peace and acceptance, forward.

Have you ever taken a path that you knew was right for you, but it was hard?  Let’s say, you plowed ahead and the difficulty eased, revealing the “necessity” of having taken that path.

I think none of us willingly take the narrow, rocky, or difficult path, in life.  In fact, Scripture reveals a truth in Matthew 7, that most of us gravitate to the wide, most-followed, crowded, easy path, when possible.

So, the next time you’re goaded into the “right direction,” perhaps you’ll do yourself a favor by not kicking against the goad.  Maybe, sit in the pain for a short time until the clouds begin to clear and you can see the sense in what seemed senseless in the beginning.

In your defense, stop roughing the kicker.  Those in your offense, in the game alongside you, are doing their best most of the time to usher you along the path you’ve selected.

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