Image and Story

Postmodern culture is image driven. The modern world was word-based. Its theologians tried to create an intellectual faith, placing reason and order at the heart of religion. Mystery and metaphor were banished as too fuzzy, too mystical, too illogical. After forfeiting to the media the role of storyteller, the church now enters a world where story and metaphor are at the heart of spirituality.
- Leonard Sweet, Post-Modern Pilgrims

Church and Mission

According to Lesslie Newbigin, the church at mission "will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighbourhood. It will be the church for the specific place where it lives, not the church for those who wish to be members of it - or, rather, it will be for them insofar as they are willing to be for the wider community."
 

Transforming Power

Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil. The greatest way to do that is through love. I believe firmly that love is a transforming power that can lift a whole community to new horizons of fair play, good will and justice.
- Martin Luther King

Windows to Heaven

Just feel like giving thanks and praising my Lord, today.
 

Pigs and Pearls

Or, to say it another way . . . On one occasion Jesus said, Don't cast your pearls before swine less they trample them underfoot and then turn and rend you.

I think he meant that it's not so much that smart, good, resourceful me has these wonderful, precious things to share - aspects even of myself, included - and that someone else is just too dumb or piggish or priggish to appreciate 'my pearls' - of wisdom or opinion or some other precious gift.

It's more that, well - pigs don't eat pearls ! - and so I need to figure out what it is they do need, if I'm to offer anything, or be anyone, helpful. What would be nourishing, appreciated, precious to them?

Some may 'trample underfoot' things, people (myself included) I think precious, worthwhile, worth something at least - because I'm offering what they perceive they do not need or want. They are likely quite unaware of any hurt I may feel to their response.

Some may 'turn and rend' me because they are still hungry but I've not given what they really need or desire. Maybe I don't have what they need; maybe they're finding it somewhere else - and will keep looking, thankyou.

A parent, a teacher, an employer, a pastor seeks to find ways, means, gifts that will truly nourish and nurture another, based on an adequate and accurate assessment of their child, student, mentee, employee. So also - I must find out what I can best and most helpfully give (if appropriate to do so at all), assessing whose need it is really, mine or another's before I cast forth my gift.

Cat and Mouse

Several times, when I was a boy, living in my family on the small market garden farm of my father, our cat Rusty left a 'gift' at our backdoor. After some time of serious hunting or in a moment of serendipitous discovery he had found this precious thing, well suited for his own amusement and advancement. Yet, after playing with (read 'torturing') this small furry creature for some time before he grew bored, and mercifully (?) taking its life, he came and left the wee present at our backdoor. Careful where you step.

Sometimes in my honest or even misguided attempts to befriend, nurture, and enhance the life of another, I too have presented what were to me precious objects (even bits and pieces of myself - opinions, suggestions, contacts, encouragement, resources) which though well-meaning and maybe even helpful to some extent, perhaps began to smell or feel more like smothering control and manipulation, ultimately seen as something less than helpful.

So it is that sometimes those we think we're helping find our ministrations to be less so than we intend and appreciate them about as much as our family used to, in finding a mangled mouse dead on our doorstep.

The problem is in me. Beyond any disappointment, I perceive my own selfish and controlling neediness, my grasping and conniving. It hurts to discover this, for - silly me - this cat really thot they'd like the mouse.