Get beyond helping and begin joining
So we were sitting in staff meeting and the subject of benevolence came up. That led to a conversation about a couple people who would like to give their time to do financial counseling to people who continually call the church asking for monetary help. This isn’t a bad idea, but like someone brought up, we have offered these classes before and they just never stick to it.
As I was sitting there listening to the conversation it sort of fit in with all the stuff God has been talking to me about regarding ministry. You see, we never live in community with these people. We say, come here, listen to this teaching, and apply these five easy steps and your financial future will only improve over time. Then we go back to our lives and wonder why they just can’t follow this simple outline… heck I do and it works for me… right?
But I don’t live where they live. Not just locale but in life. I don’t have kids selling drugs on the corner of my street to buy bread because mom is passed out on the couch. I don’t have to worry about inviting someone with a different color skin to my house at night for fear the neighbors might jump them. I don’t live where they live. WE don’t live where they live. We somehow need to get beyond helping and begin joining.
I see God drawing me to this community more and more. The interactions and things that just happen to me, my heart, the compassion God placed in me… all those things working together. I still don’t know where or what that will look like.
But I can certainly understand Pauls comments about its better for a man to not marry so his thoughts will be toward pleasing the Lord and not concerned about pleasing his wife. I mean, if I wasn’t married with kids… I could so see myself moving downtown, living where I see the need. But I don’t want my kids there… or my wife…
Whats THAT say about my faith… hmmmm
You see, I’m willing to put myself in harms way if I know its where God wants me to be. In fact I do way more than the wife is happy with. I really don’t fear the world when its just me. But I don’t have the same conviction? confidence? faith?… whatever… when it comes to my wife and kids.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally involve my family in the things I do for God. They went with us to Bay St Louis even when the CDC cautioned heavily against children going. They work with us at the Ronald McDonald House. They have been with me on many occasions when I have decided to stop and help total strangers… they are part of my life, therefore part of my ministry…
I was reading The New Saint Benedict by Ivan Kauffman and came across this:
If you choose to view the world as a place of danger to be avoided, it will become that�a lawless jungle in which we humans are trapped. If instead
you choose to view the world as a garden to be tended, as a great gift given
us by God, it will become what God intended it to be�a place of great
beauty and happiness.Do not flee the world. Enter joyfully into its problems and possibilities.
That just resonates with me.
Anyway, just thinking out loud here for the most part
