God and the Power Pivot.

Maybe you’ve seen this new gadget marketed by Quirky as the Power Pivot. It has become wildly popular. This one is now in our home and it is providing power to multiple products all from its resting place under Pam’s side of the bed.

Pam has become quite the techy one in our family. She has more electronic devices than some people have credit cards. To keep all of them charged simultaneously, however, she has discovered the traditional straight power strip just does not work.

The Power Pivot, however, does. Instead of the single strip that limits the number of devices you can connect at one time, the Power Pivot is flexible, allowing for several devices to be connected all at once.

Given how I’m wired, I could not help but see the spiritual parallels.

God and the Power Pivot…

We all search for a power source, do we not? It is the nature of the human experience. The famous passage from The Confessions of Augustine goes like this: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Throughout all of human history, one can find a kind of restlessness in search of a Divine connection.

God and the Power Pivot have many names.

What the Power Pivot does is no different than what the traditional Power Strip does. They both provide a connecting point to the source of power. They just have different names and shapes.

It’s the same with God, isn’t it? Zeus to Greeks; Brahman to Hindus; Allah to Muslims; Yahweh to Jews; and, Jesus to Christians. And, these are but a drop in the proverbial bucket of Divine names.

The mistake almost all people have made throughout history, and still make today, is to confuse the power strip for the power source, the pivot for the person. Whenever this occurs, and it does so in almost every religion, followers wind up arguing for the strip instead of worshiping the source. Protecting their religion becomes more important than connecting to its Source. Doesn’t this explain much of the violence in the news? Much of the widespread departure from organized religion as well? People are tired of this confusion. People are weary of the war waged almost universally between people of varying religions.

To young Timothy, Saint Paul warned, “Do not hold to a form of godliness, but miss the power source behind it” (2 Timothy 3:5).

Whenever you feel threatened and defensive about your religion, haven’t you made this error already?

Haven’t you confused the pivot for the Person? Or, holding to “form of godliness, but missing the God behind it?”

The Buddha said, “The finger that points to the moon is not the moon.”

Or, as we might put it here: The pivot that provides the power is not the power.