Everything becomes less organized with time.
Entropy, from the laws of thermodynamics, tells us the Universe is always moving from a higher to lower state of order. Consider your home for a moment. You clean, organize, and stage only to see it move away from that idyllic state almost as soon as you have achieved it. Without deliberate, repeated interventions, your home can quickly descend into chaos (and all the more rapidly with children involved).
I submit that our lives and relationships are no different. For what relationship or aspect of your life has improved as a result of neglect? We spend time with people and are able to effectively align ourselves, but as soon as we depart so too does our thinking. Errors in the area of trust only exacerbate the dissonance and accelerate our divergence. Like our homes, direct effort is required for restoration. Unfortunately, in the case of our lives and many relationships, the power to achieve restoration can exceed our capacity. It sometimes require a more powerful corrective agent.
“God’s business is putting things right;
he loves getting the lines straight,
Setting us straight. Once we’re standing tall,
we can look him straight in the eye.”
We are fiercely independent and love to feel that we have supreme control over of our lives. However, at the same time we can all identify gaps that are simply beyond us. Errors and oversights we and others have made along the way that have hastened this entropy and expanded the distance between us. For we possess amazing potential to both build up others and inflict harm with our words and actions.
But, as the author of the Psalm points out, we are not beyond hope. For there is one who longs to redeem us and “loves getting the lines straight….” Maybe we can allow Him to do His work. Let us discard the self-imposed limits we have placed upon his restorative power and allow him his due influence in our lives and relationships. Perhaps with his assistance we can reverse the tide of Entropy.