Today I am participating in Five Minute Friday, where a group of writers get together and free write about a one word prompt for 5 minutes. Today's word is "distraction."
Some of you might already know this, but some of you might not. My blog title is based on the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10 where Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to him, but Martha is not.
In the story in Luke chapter 10, the Bible says Martha was distracted. What does that mean?
To me, distraction means letting other things occupy your attention. And in recent years, it means to turn away from something you were already doing.
Both of these definitions would make sense in Martha’s situation. She was definitely letting other things occupy her attention. She was trying to serve the house, which was a noble thing, but it was distracting her at that moment from the most important thing. JESUS was in her house. The Lord was in her house y’all.
Her motivation might have been correct, but he was in all essence just telling her to sit down, which leads me to my other point.
Maybe she had been sitting down listening to him. Maybe she had been in the posture of a disciple at one point, but had gotten distracted by something, and gone back to do things women were regularly supposed to do.
During the time of Jesus, and before women were not really considered disciples. In fact, they weren’t even allowed to speak to religious leaders in public. Shocking, I know. Nevertheless that is the way women were treated.
And then here comes Jesus, and flips all that on its head. So, Martha may have been distracted by what others thought of her, and she went back to doing what she thought she was “supposed to do.”
I think that can happen to all of us. Instead of going with what Jesus is really like, and what he says, we can let pressure from other people distract us from our mission.
Just a note, when we see Martha later, she has a super important theological discussion with Jesus. You can read about that here. She was no longer distracted, and she was the Martha the Lord meant her to be.
For more information about the stories in my post, check out Luke chapter 10:38-42 and John chapter 11:17-28 in the Bible.
Mary and Martha's story always challenges me. I think we all have times when we get distracted from Jesus by our busyness or our worries about other people's expectation. It is encouraging that Martha learned to change.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment Lesley! I love to think about Martha's transformation. It means that change is possibly, than we grow in the things we know about the Lord, and how much we personally know him. And we can grow in the knowledge of what he has done for us.
DeleteMartha is looked down upon,
ReplyDeletewhen compared to sister Mary,
a to-do-list kind of clown,
far from the extraordinary.
Yes, she got exasperated,
and she sorta snapped at Sis,
but I have always hesitated
to really make too much of this,
for I think that Martha listened
with a practised, knowing ear,
and that she was not missing
the stuff she really had to hear;
and was Mary, maybe, true to form,
that skipping work was her norm?
Thank you Andrew. I always appreciate you visiting my blog and sharing your thoughts.
DeleteThis truly resonates with me. I'm so often distracted from what I think I'm called to do by what I think others expect me to do. I once read a mother's story about her daughter withh Down syndrome, whom she wanted to name after Mary but ended up naming after Martha. This has always resounded with me. I'm #19 in the FMF.
ReplyDeleteI am glad it spoke to you Astrid. I have grown to like Martha more and more.
DeleteMary and Martha ... great story about service and distraction.
ReplyDelete