Psalm 119:120 Trembling

Winter's Bone

I recently re-watched one of my favorite movies, Winter's Bone, starring a very young looking Jennifer Lawrence. Her character, Ree Dolly, is responsible for feeding and raising her young brother and sister because her mother has mentally checked out of the world and her father is almost always gone. And now he is missing.

Ree's efforts to find her father and thus save their home is complicated by the pervasive code of the Ozarks where she lives. Jessup, her father, is a meth cooker, a fact known and accepted by everyone. One person in the movie even says, matter of factly, that "everyone cooks crank." It's just become part of the culture, as the best way to make good money.

Turns out, though, that the code of the hills means no one wants to tell her anything that could help her find her father. She is chastised repeatedly and beaten more than once when she refuses to stop asking forbidden questions. In spite of her fear of stepping across the wrong lines and angering some very dangerous people, she fears more losing her family's home and losing her ability to care for her brother and sister. So she persists, leading toward a chilling conclusion.

I love this movie because I know people like Ree Dolly and the people she encounters. I've met them behind the walls of a women's prison in Missouri. I can see their faces now as I write about them, young women who found themselves entangled in the culture of the Ozarks drug business and caught up in the legal traps of law enforcement. Some of them had real difficulty comprehending what they had done wrong, because they were simply following the only set of rules they'd ever known, the only "laws" that made any sense to them.

And yet, still, they were in the wrong. And now they were in prison.

My flesh trembles in fear of you;
I stand in awe of your laws.

Psalm 119:120

Everyone lives in some sort of community of culture that exists in a cobbled together cage of accepted rules and practices. The people who live in that cage of their own making often don't even realize how different they are than the people in other cages. This is what they know and this is how they live.

They love what they love and they fear what they fear because they've convinced themselves those things are important to love and to fear.

When I was growing up in the church, I was scared to question the doctrines I was being taught from the pulpit, in Sunday School, and youth group. Our church culture made it quite clear that doubting the officially accepted teachings of our non-denominational denomination was as sinful as doubting God Himself.

We loved the laws of the Bible. We stood in awe of them. They were the building blocks from which our way of religious life was constructed.

We allowed them to become a cage that held our faith.

The way out of the cages of fear that restrict us is to find a better target for our love and more genuine object of our fear.

The reason David stands in awe of God's laws is because he stands in awe of the God he loves. He doesn't make the mistake of loving God's laws more than God himself - or more than God's people.

Never get overly comfortable and lackadaisical about your relationship with the Word. Check yourself regularly to make sure you're keeping it in the proper perspective.