I have decided to write a slightly longer Musing this week, mostly because I gave myself last week off. It was not my intent, but as I began to write, I realized that this topic was perfectly suited for Holy Week and the end of Lent.

Many of you will finish the beginning of the quote that I have placed in the title with the words of uncle Ben in the Spider-man franchise: “With great power comes great responsibility.” However, despite my own inner nerd, I have come to know a very different ending to this line. When I hear “With great power…” My brain instead fills in the words “…comes great consequence.”

The reason behind this comes out of my own experiences of gifts. As created beings, and especially as Christians, we are given certain gifts which can grow and flourish as we use them. In my life two of those gifts have been music and emotional comprehension. Let’s start with the easy one first.

If you are a musician, or have had any musical training, I think you will recognize the following scenario. You are sitting in a concert or a service or even a restaurant. You begin to hear music and immediately your brain kicks into critique mode. At first it might just be understanding the song, assessing the quality of the melody and harmonies, but before too long you begin hearing all of the flaws that are being made. The more training you have, the harder it becomes to enjoy music in a casual fashion. A parent with little to no musical training can sit through a fifth grade band concert a lot easier than a parent with a music degree. Here, the gift is the comprehension of music and the ability to make it in an excellent fashion. The consequence, however, is the inability to enjoy music without precision or even perfection.

For me, I have noticed a great consequence to my gift for understanding emotions. I see many more nuances in emotional states than most people. This has to do with the way that I have experienced emotions, and also how my brain processes emotional states. It allows me to quickly identify what people are feeling and assess the strength of those feelings, even if the person is still unsure of what they are experiencing. Again, this comes with the consequence. Because we live in a fallen world, my brain does not process other things as well. The cost of being able to experience and categorize emotions is my own inability to regulate emotions within myself. Specifically, emotions surrounding depression and anger. While I believe this is truly a consequence of the human sin nature, I also see it as a balance to the gift that I was given.

Now, all of these have to do with having something so good that the imperfections become more clear. And perhaps the two examples above are a bit extreme, especially since they both deal with the fallen world and the imperfections we know we will find there. But what about God? Can this principle apply to him too? I think it can, and it was a professor in seminary who pointed out to me. In the same way that we See more imperfections the more trained we are in a given area, God is perfect and without sin so when He sees or experiences sin, as in Christ’s death on the cross, He is much more in tune with the pain and the suffering that sin causes. While we see sin and sometimes don’t even think that it is too bad, even the smallest sin would cause a sinless being more pain than we could imagine.

So no matter what your gift is, and no matter how that gift is balanced out by some kind of negative consequence, remember as those painful times come that they are only fleeting. Using our gifts bring great joy, not only to ourselves but to others and especially the one who has given us those gifts. And as frustrating as those consequences may be, they are still only a fraction of what God experiences every time one of His created people goes astray.

Pax,

Paul Hart Cochran