Dwight from The Office has a new site that I stumbled upon today. I'm curious to see the debates that are started on it, as the site relates to questions about faith....should be fun.
In case you were unaware, Lent has officially started. Christians will, for the next 40 days, follow Jesus through his suffering and ultimately his death. We do this in order to truly have something to rejoice in this Easter. Lent gives us the opportunity to do some things that we're normally extremely horrible at: grieving and remembering.
I've neglected this blog as of late....not that it really matters to the four of you who read. But, I wanted to briefly write something to get y'all up to speed on the randomness that is my life.
Parallel factors are destroying the church in our context. We have pressing needs and we don't know how they will be met. Where will I get my significance? What can I do to make myself feel that I count? Who cares about me and understands me? Where can I find intimacy? We are a well-fed prison camp. We have everything we need materially - housing, food, computers, cars, entertainment, travel - but inside we are isolated and empty.Worship then becomes the way we try to deal with our emptiness and our isolation. The point about our worship is to make us feel better; the point about God is to make us feel good. So we abandon scripture reading, because that's boring . We abandon the gospel story, because that happened a long time ago and doesn't look very relevant. We can go through a whole worship service without hearing any reference to the fact that God created the world, delivered Israel, sent Jesus to live and die for us, and raised him from the dead. The Israelites forgot the gospel and gave up on God's written word because they were so concerned with their personal needs. The same thing has happened to us.There is a tragic paradox here. We need to be brought outside ourselves by seeing our lives in the context of a bigger picture, a bigger story - the gospel story. But we are so overwhelmed by our emptiness, isolation, and insignificance that we don't pay attention to the bigger story. All we want to do is think about ourselves in need, so we turn God into someone whose focus is on meeting our needs. We make God a quick fix. But quick fixes don't work.
On one hand, you have something happening tomorrow that most would have never thought would happen, and on the other you still see so much racial injustice in our society. But I do think that what he did was definitely not in vein, as sometimes you never see the result of the seed you've helped to plant. Here's to devoting(and giving) your life for something much bigger than yourself.
"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares."
Henri Nouwen
...I want to be more like this type of friend in 2009.
Posts
All Comments
