A Newspaper

Two pieces of information first:

I’ve talked about Terry’s Tucker before, but in case you’ve forgotten, Church runs a free meal on Wednesday nights. They get about 80-120 people each week and it’s quite a community event.

Also on Wednesday nights, (but later on) we have our young adults homegroup generally followed by a trip to McDonalds to finish off our socialising and grab a coffee or similar.

So, last night we finished a look at John 8-9, spent some time encouraging our first two guinea pigs (Mick and Iz) and headed up to Maccas. Geoff and I somehow managed to get there a bit before everyone else, so we’d gotten something and sat down and had the paper out for the quiz. The front cover of the Macca’s courtesy paper was pretty ripped up. An old guy with three decent bags and a sleeping bag type roll was sitting opposite us. Suddenly he was over at our table and saying something and shoving the same paper (but a non ripped copy) at us and not letting us not take it. It was hard to understand him but I worked out that he was mumbling a, ‘thank you for all you do and this is the least I can give back’. I worked out straight up that he was one of the Terry’s guys. I don’t think Geoff really heard him properly, but it blew me away.

I haven’t helped that much at Terry’s, sure I’ve done one cooking week and helped Narelle out with the kids a few times, but that guy knew we were from Vineyard and wow, that feeling of being part of something that’s actually serving people effectively.

So the immediate reaction was nice, positive, humbling even. I was thinking more about it later. The old guy, who was clearly homeless gave us a paper. A paper we already had, sure it was a little nicer than ours but it didn’t belong to him, it belonged to McDonalds, he did nothing to get it except come into the store and pick it up – yet I still felt profoundly honored.

You can look at God and us and the rare occasions when we remember that we don’t really ‘own’ anything and certainly don’t deserve anything and feel pretty insignificant and dare I say insecure about offering anything at all to God. We get this idea in our heads that we can only really do so much and our thanks falls far short. Clearly we’re a human, we’ve got nothing on Him, he really doesn’t need help, what we can give is so so minimal compared to what he’s given us and as much responsibility as we may claim to have in say tithing/giving, the money really isn’t ours to start with.

It’s probably an obvious parallel, the whole incident was another small look for me into understanding worship. It was a pretty solid way to be reminded just how important it is to thank God, however we show that… and that although it sometimes seem thoroughly insignificant there’s actually a fair bit more to it than we understand.