Why does it seem like the most beautiful minds, biggest hearts, and strongest hands stand aside while our churches and society get ripped apart like rotten confetti? I keep finding people on the outskirts of the fight with SO much to offer if they would just be willing to put up with the hypocrisy they are so willing to point out long enough to do something about it. It makes me want to cry. I keep hearing the same story about how no one in the church loves enough or knows enough or is smart enough or whatever. Then, somehow, this becomes the reason why they don't get involved! "I just don't have the energy or the patience to put up with all that." It would be like a crowd of warriors armed to the teeth watching a couple of wolves attack innocent people and doing nothing!
The response I usually get from the emotive outburst above is something like "but I've tried and they don't listen" or "they don't let me speak because I'm too young or a woman or I've had a divorce." I don't know what to say to that other than to look at Abraham (too old), Moses (an outcast), David (an adulterer), Ruth (a woman), John the Baptist (a rebel weirdo), Mary (another woman), Phoebe (another woman), Priscilla (another woman), Paul (a persecuter of the church), Jonah (a prejudiced hypocrite), and on and on and on. Then I think of the biggest sinner, the most arrogant, hypocritical, immature idiot to ever walk the planet (me) and think "well crap, if God can work through this pile of junk, imagine what He can do through you!"
OK. I'm done banging my head against the wall.
The Fight
Monday, January 02, 2006
Monday, January 02, 2006
2 Comments:
Well, foolish as it is to respond to an emotional outburst, I'm going to offer this up anyway. The longer I've been around ministers--haven't been in ministry all that long myself, though I've got no personal experience to the contrary--the more I've come to believe that wisdom combined with those elusive fruits of the spirit equal a kind of subtlety more on par with cold war than frontal assault. Now, all my favorite images of chivalry and charging into the fray and the like are quite lost, but it's what I think anyway. I, more than most, am all for turning over tables, but in the story (unless John's telling it) that's sort of the last straw before crucifixion. I'm of the opinion that Jesus knows you don't act like that without getting strung up. Aside from this, the rest of his ministry is doing what he thought was important rather than attacking those who thought other things were important, being attacked rather than taking the offensive, asking distracting questions rather than giving the final answer, and so on. It's a much more difficult model, I think, but that seems to be the way of it in that man's footsteps. As for wolves, when they attack my flock, you can bet I'll tear them to pieces. Wolf hunting, however, is not my pastime.
the model of interaction you are describing is definitively one to aspire to once you are involved. i'm refering to people who, for whatever reason, have withdrawn from or never attempted sincere fellowship with a church as an adult.
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