Sunday, March 19, 2006
READY?!?!?!!! O....KAY!!!!
So this morning I'm dressed and ready. I'm going to a church service. Yes, I said it, I am going to a church service. Don't faint. ;) LOL I'm not sure what to expect, I'm going to a lent service. I have never been to one so I decided to go. We'll how it goes. I'll let y'all know.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Thing about groups, church groups, any kind of group, maybe, is that the role one has in one group, or, maybe, the supposed role, is a bit different from that in another group, eh?
Like, I don't know about anyone else, but my role in one long-time church group I was in was defined by my family. My father was forthright and was considered quite conservative, maybe because of his age, or whatever, and by his unwaveringness -- I don't really mean in a bad sense -- maybe in being able to be depended on, or something like that.
I was a daughter, and people kind of defined me in those terms. On the one hand, they might take out on me anything they wouldn't have dared to say to him. On the other hand, for the most part, they tended to attribute to me, his and my mother's qualities.
To the extent that, THERE, one would have to make rather corky remarks in order to even seem normal. I think if I'd walked down Main Street in my bathing suit in winter, someone might have said I was 'conservatively-dressed.'
Scene 2: Go to some community in a different part of the country where one's family is NOT known. Then, make the corky remark, and it will be taken as one's mainstream thing, because people there do not immediately attribute all sort of conservative characteristics to one. People may there think one is avant-garde, instead.
I think that, away from home, I have an obligation to clarify a bit more where exactly I might be coming from. Probably, in my home community, over time, I might have emerged as a separate entity from my folks in some manner.
So, what one says HERE and what one says THERE, although, perhaps, it means the same to one, it may come off very differently to those who are hearing it.
People in new places do not know exactly what one is about. Now, you're bound to raise the question, Jewels, as to whether one does, oneself, but that's another thing, eh?
What I mean is, that in the presence of some known connections and history, people may attribute certain characteristics to us. In the absence of these, they'll start from whatever we'll give them.
If I behave as a reaction to what people in a former community have attributed to me, it may not work in the same way to the people in the second community, I'm thinking.
I did not think your previous remark about becoming God was a Shirley Maclaine, based on what I'd previously seen you say on your blog and in the Forum. I had that history to help me.
Had I just tuned in, probably, I might have thought that almost immediately, given that a lot of people talk exactly in that way, these days, you therefore meant something like what Shirley said.
I'm not sure you 'became God,' even in your sense of it, to my knowledge. I think that you might have had an opinion on something. If expressed just as your opinion, that's fine, eh? As in, "Well, I"m not so sure about that. It seems to me it's ___________. I wouldn't want to do it."
I'm sure it's not wrong to have an opinion.
If you had been PRESCRIPTIVE about it, or if you had presumed to judge other people without knowing their motives, if you'd presumed you'd had X-Ray vision, maybe then you move into areas outside your sphere.
Like, a lot of things we see in the Christian world may not be what WE'RE comfortable with. At the same time, they may be all right at a certain level of maturity or knowledge or understanding, eh?
Like, you might be pleased as punch if your eight-year-old child decided to put a Jesus banner on his bike.
If a forty-year-old knows ONLY the banner thing and uses it in a vindictive way, we'd wonder at his/her development. Even though a banner in itself is not wrong and may, in fact, be right for some people, and stuff like that, eh?
A Bible teacher I once knew said, "Well, the Lord saved a lot of weird people," and maybe that's part of it. Maybe things'd be a lot tidier and cooler if some of the mighty and so on of this world were Christians, but, well, they're NOT, a lot of them, are they?
A lot of people who are born-again, and I'm not talking just about the superficial, aren't particularly bright or mighty or super-sophisticated. Some ARE. Some are very bright and so on. But, not so many.
Yes, sometimes the bright ones take as much flak as the not-bright ones. And there must be a problem at the middle, also, I think.
So, we just kinda do whatever we see to glorify God, and it looks pretty dumb, sometimes. But He sees the motive, eh?
But we have to grant each other a little inability, I'm thinking. Not only sinfulness, but inability. Not in the sense of God not coming in, but in the sense that everybody out there doing things is not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer. God, maybe, ASKED the sharpest knife in the drawer to do something, and he/she didn't.
Or, maybe somebody offended the sharpest knife in the drawer and that person withdrew. I don't know.
Hope you enjoyed your Lent service, Jewels.
Sorry to be long-winded. I'm in a place where there's no available church service, so I blether on a bit.
Post a Comment