2 posts tagged “community”

I am disappointed.  We are pursuing adopting children from Colombia.  And we had asked our congregation Elders for help with two things. We asked if they could make an adoption fund so that gifts could be tax deductible and we asked if we could allowed to sell fund raising products to members.  The answer on both counts was no. 

Apparently setting up the adoption fund is “a lot of work.”  Well I’ve got a really bad attitude right at the moment but I’m thinking back to “a lot of work” that I’ve done on a few different projects for this congregation.  I guess this feels a little bit like sitting down to a nice dinner with friends, only one person takes over the conversation and won’t let anyone else at the table get a word in edgewise.  I just feel resentful and a little used.

We’ve got a lot of money to raise.  I’m not sure now how that is going to work.  So much for “bearing one another’s burdens” and a sense of community and other crap like that.  Oh well.  I am disappointed.  Feeling a little bit unloved.  But whatever.  It will pass.  It needs to pass by Sunday.  Because I’m NOT a pretender.  And if someone asks me how I feel about this decision – I WILL give an HONEST answer.  And maybe my best impression of "You can't handle the truth."  May the Lord have mercy on us all.

I’m growing unfond of the word “saved.”  Well, not in the sense that I have received a gift of salvation from Jesus that has significantly altered my life for the better.  But more in this “us and them” kind of semantic way we talk about saved and unsaved people.   I wonder how many times words like “unsaved” have been used with cruelty, to determine community membership, or rather – community exclusion.  I believe God is at work in everyone’s life, whether or not they recognize it or even approve.  God may work to rescue a witch from the full consequences of a delivering a curse, or He may divert a plane away from its intended destination like on 9/11.  He may allow a person to break an ankle rather than loosing the leg entirely.  Yesterday I was rear ended by a teenager who wasn’t paying attention.  Who’s to say that wouldn’t have been much worse had God not protected us both?  Maybe that kid needed a shake up, and God went easy on him.  I think there are so many ways the hands of God save us that we may never fully understand this side of heaven.  One of the most devastating and bizarre betrayals of my life may have actually saved me in the end.  I would be a different person now if I had stayed too closely aligned with an ultra religious friend who was (at one time) my mentor mother.  I’m more compassionate than ever now, seeing up close and personal the harm that hyper-spiritualism can do.  I’d like to find new ways to speak of people who don’t know Jesus in the specific and intentional way that I like to think I do.  There are many out there who are more generous, more compassionate, more tactful, and more thoughtful about many aspects of life and truth than I am, yet maybe they haven’t thought of Jesus much in the last year.  It is unrealistic to think that I can determine from my earth bound perspective the saved or unsavedness of such a person.  God alone knows the attitude of the heart.  Clearly good works is not enough to purchase a ticket to heaven, but since when has heaven been the major point of Christianity?  Yes, it’s been used as a motivator, or perhaps a scare tactic.  But isn’t Christianity more about death and resurrection engaging the common moments of our lives in the right here and now?  There are many religious people who are more cruel than many unreligious would ever dream of being, but they think the ends justify the means.  They think that because they have truth on their side, that being right is enough.  Dead right, is still wrong.  I guess I’m on the search for new words to express more than just whether or not someone has prayed a prayer – as if salvation was a one moment thing rather than an every-breath-I-breathe kind of thing.  There is so much more to this, and the words fail so miserably.