It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of everyday life and forget what’s really important. My journey from living an ordinary life in the suburbs to being the focus of an FBI task force began with an over-emphasis on my life’s minutiae - my job. Now, a job that pay the bills may not seem like a minor thing, but is it as important as God? Or, your faith? Your soul? Your spouse? Your children? Your freedom? The truth? Unless your job is serving God or others, which mine was not, a long list of life’s assests precedes a job in importance and relegates it to the realm of minutiae. Unfortunately, I made my job the most vital aspect of my life and, as such, it defined the rules – the right and wrong – of my life. And that, my friends, led to the FBI task force.
Of course, not everyone who puts his/her job first ends up in a federal prison. But there are other kinds of prisons: the prison of possessions, the prison of lust, the prison of pride. Freedom comes when life’s minutiae are kept in their proper place and God alone in allowed to rule our lives. I’ve heard several men in prison say something like, “I’ve never been so free as I have been in here.†Looking back, I think I understand. For the first time in their lives those men put the minutiae of thier lives – their prison existence – in its proper place and elevated God to His.