Episode 266: I’m Talkin. . .Structure

I’m talking episode 266 for May 21st, 2023.

This is Joel from the I’m Talking microcast, where I share my thoughts on a topic that has piqued my interest this past week.

This week we’re talking structure.

I was trying to find a definition for the word structure so that you knew what I was trying to address this week, and it was very difficult.

There’s a couple that I liked.

It says the quality of being organized, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking of organization as a structure.

There’s a range to a plan.

That may be a little more like I’m thinking this week, but the one thing I know I’m not thinking is to be loosey-goosey.

Structure can mean many things to many people, and it really is an individual thing.

There are people that are go with the flow, I don’t need a map, I’ll get there when I get there, time has no meaning, and there are people who you said 6.05 and it’s 6.06 and you’re not here yet, or you said that you were going to do this in the morning and it’s 11.30 so the morning’s about over, and those kind of things.

I think I fall on the structure side to being more repetitive with a plan, knowing exactly what I want to do.

In that vein, I always have a structure to my day.

There are not plans for every minute, but there is some structure to it.

My mornings are often repetitive, and I do the same things, I eat the same thing, I get ready the same way.

For the work days, it’s always at approximately the same time, those kind of things.

At work, I have things that I do at a certain time, and I have my coffee and a snack at a certain time, and then I take my lunch at a certain time.

In that sense, I’m very structured, but I know others in my life who are not that way, and sometimes that rubs the structured person the wrong way, and sometimes my structure rubs people who are a little more free-flowing the wrong way.

And therein lies the challenge for those of us who call ourselves Christians.

As a Christian, I believe there needs to be some structure for us to learn and grow in our faith.

I think we need to have time in God’s Word, we need to spend time with God’s people, we need to be spending time in prayer and talking with God.

We need to be thinking about those things.

It doesn’t need to be always at a given time of day or something like that, but I think there has to be some structure in how we learn.

I don’t think it makes sense to just flip open the Bible and point to a verse and see what happens.

Maybe God can work that way, but I think God works inside structure as well, if we look at the world that He created.

And if we don’t have structure, I think that’s going to come into play when we share our faith and when we try to figure out how to answer someone’s questions.

We don’t have to have all the answers, and we don’t necessarily need to have all the answers or won’t have all the answers even, because God will speak through us.

But we need to know that there are important things about what we believe.

There are things that we stand on that cannot change.

We know who God is, we know what Jesus did for us on the cross, we know He came back from the dead.

All these things are critical to what we believe as Christians, and there’s structure to that.

And so I think if we fail to understand that there is some structure required in how we approach our Christianity, then it will potentially stunt our growth.

I think we have to have the freedom to flow with what is happening around us.

We can’t really schedule divine appointments, but we need to be aware that they could happen.

And so in that, we need to have some freedom from structure to be able to guide conversations in a way that we weren’t really expecting, or to reach people who all of a sudden ask questions that we thought they would never ask, but then the structure comes in because we have spent time in God’s Word, we have spent time with other Christians, we have spent time in church, and we have spent time learning the basics so that we are ready in those free-flowing moments to share our faith in Jesus Christ.

Until next week, this is Joel from the I’m Talking Microcast.