September 23, 2010 – Nehemiah 13

Nehemiah has left town to go back to Babylon for a report or something to the king.  We don’t really know how long he was gone, but while he is gone, things fail pretty badly in Jerusalem.  The three main things Nehemiah fixes are the misuse of temple areas and the Levites, the working on the Sabbath, and the marrying of foreign people.  Not so much with the Levites, but with the other two, he points out directly that these sins were the exact reason that Jerusalem fell in the past.  After all the rebuilding, the reading of the law, the unifying cheering and celebrating, they go back to making the same mistakes.  What this makes me think about it how feelings don’t last.  What really comes to mind is religious retreats and where they are effective and where they appear flawed.  Retreats are generally a positive thing and I owe a lot of to retreats for many of the good things in my life.  They are an opportunity to meet people, grow in faith, gain confidence, learn, heal, and just get closer to God. 

Where retreats sometimes or maybe even often fail is that they are many times based on feelings.  People come off retreats feeling great, perhaps feeling different than they have ever felt.  That, in and of itself is not a bad thing, but if it stops there, it is almost always doomed to failure.  The reason is the feelings are not permanent and as soon as the good feelings go away, a person is left searching for what a way to get that good feeling back.  Retreats, I don’t believe, set out to only change feelings.  Many have talks that talk about a change of heart or Metanoia or a complete turning around of one’s life.   A step in that direction is often taken, but if it is not supported or enhanced after the retreat is over, people will quickly fall back into old ways.  Here we see the Hebrews that had a great emotional experience and had feelings of change and committed to it.  But when Nehemiah left, so did their support and encouragement and when the feelings leave, so did the change.  Let us remember that commitments and changes that occur based on feelings will disintegrate when those feelings disappear.  When our lives change for the better, when we make a turn towards God, we cannot stop, we must continue to grow, or we will find ourselves like seeds falling on rock or in thorns, and that change will soon wither away.