MacKenzie's book deals with change and leadership and the rules of an institution but the principal is sound in so many areas of our life. Hairballs are giant, knotted strands of hair; one woven in and out of a another, in an accumulated and tangled mass. We create them all the time. Not actual hairballs, but figurative hairballs. We make them out of relationships when we get entangled with others to the point we lose ourselves. Sometimes, we create them when we work ourselves deep into a situation we would have been better served to walk away from.
The worst hairballs I deal with are the ones I have created myself or have seen created in others around the understanding of scripture. Overtime, misunderstanding, or misuse of scripture has created guidelines, rules, standards and modes of living that become set in stone. Rigidity is placed in our lives to control us or control or selves. Every new rule created, is another hair for the hairball.
Let me give you an example. As a small child, I struggled with telling the truth. Around the ages of 3 and 4, I would "embellish" the truth, often to escape punishment for something I am sure I didn't mean to do. My Grandmother, I am sure out of desperation, told me that God sent a plague of boils on the Egyptians for not heading the words of God. God didn't want me to lie so the sore I had just began suffering from, clearly was sign from God that I had told a lie. To this day, if i get a small fever blister in my mouth, I am frantically trying to figure out if I mistakenly told a lie to someone.
Eventually the hairy mass of entangled rules becomes heavy, burdensome and overbearing. It ends up either pulling us down into a life (abundant life) threatening position or we become choked to the point of ridding ourself of the hairball, God's Holy Word included.
A hairball disables us from taking in nourishment of it is large enough. We find that we are unable to truly feast on the life found in Scripture because the hairball is in the way. Everything we read, instead of being digested is wrapped up in the hairball and added to the existing set rules within the hairball. no new deep and meaningful understanding can come from life in the Word. Every word is formed in your mind through the lens of fuzzy, tangled knots of misunderstanding. It entraps you. Snares your thinking. Robs you of creativity and life. These tangled, preconceived, notions keep you from "hearing" what God has for you. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Movement said in reference to reading scripture, "Inquire willingly, and hear with silence the words of holy men." The silence we need to hear with is born out of listening with out the swirl of rules and knotted up beliefs passed down through years mis-teaching.
I am not proposing that with life in Christ, in the Word we are free to believe what ever we will and that will be no changes in how we are expected to live life. But what I find is the hairball, as I have describes keeps us from understanding God through His voice, not the voice of others who have lacked understanding, or have used scripture to control, or have read it through a hazy lens of their own.
What I propose we do is free ourselves of the hairball. Pray that God guide our understanding of scripture, read more than scripture, read the works of others that been examples of God working through them in a mighty way. Weigh what we read against the totality of scripture. What does God say about a specific topic throughout scripture. Reflect upon what God is teaching us in that reading. Most importantly, read; read scripture for yourself, read it for you; read.
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