Published June 11, 2005 by

Muse

….back dating (it is actually the 13th today). Stonelea/business conference. Exceptional experience. Fairly interesting sessions. Given so much food.

so… what I wrote (two seperate times on the 11th) I actually found it pretty hard to think through anything. Random musing below.

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It is interesting. Observing myself and my strong desire for solitude. How I can be completely content to be well, alone. Particularly when I can sit in front of some expanse or peaceful no, even busy aspect of life. This is where I am met. I came out with two initiatives. The first to work out all the stuff – to plan I suppose the rest of my holidays. The second to escape my frustration of not having a camera to capture the moment/the place, the peace and set out to actually experience it. God said something about that to me.

I went for a walk and found people. The room is nice but no place when there is better outside. So I am sitting on the edge of this sweeping verandah with vines hanging beside me keeping me company. It is dusk. Some mountain across from me with an icing of cloud before the break where it is less dense and returning again to seamless cover. The stars wont come out tonight.

Oh there are distractions. Cars passing ever so often. A noisy cow. Tennis balls.

So I understand that I need practice in capturing the moment in words. What I want to do. To learn. To paint, to photograph with letters.

Grey and green. Not depressing, The quiet when you listen to it is replaced with noise. Birds, cows. There is life.

The poem… one line of it returned to me. I can’t remember anything but ‘the stillness’.
It is not still.

Is this one more cog in the wheel of finding a place. Discovering a bit more of who I am. Which in reality should be discovering a bit more of who you are.

Interrupted.

Moved inside.

I wonder God about the discrepancies of my writing. How I flick from writing to a ‘mock’ audience, to writing for you, writing to remember, writing because of writing.

Am I isolated. Yes. Do I do so intentionally. Yes. I like alone. I need you.
Do I like alone so much because I haven’t found the company I yet want.
Am I lonely. Not right now. Bigger picture, perhaps yes. But that time will come.

For now.

What do you want me to do? More so, how do I use this? What are my goals my dreams?

Got stopped short during the discussion on ‘Harmonised Passions”. When the question was asked, who knows you so well that they can look into your life and tell you where you’ve well, hmm need to re-emphasise your time.

What barriers do I have in friendships?

I thought about it. Who knows me so well besides you God? There are those I spend YITS day’s with. Bar two of them I haven’t known them more than 5months. That’s not long enough. (and 3 days out of every 7 besides). Do the maths. Not long.

Sam and Jess. Barriers there. Sister’s best friend.

Friends like Burkie, that know maybe head processes, but cannot possibly give effective insight into actions – how time is spent, how I live, unless I articulate it in the first place.

Aside from that. They are family – barriers there, self created, sanity created.
Or they are overseas, or I see them seldom.

This is what I am seeking to build with Katie and Jo.

In reality. The friendship building ability of Rebecca. Absolutely sucks. Be it influenced by eternally moving, fear of commonality, fear of a place of being. Yes.

Harsh truth of living elsewhere your whole life. Making friends you cannot keep in face to face contact on a regular basis. Once a year a miracle. And the year gap changes you so much that you essentially have to start from scratch again.

Melancholy.

Lord. Help me to be intentional. About friendships, writing, spending time with you, building relationships. Work in me. Grow me. Use me. I need you.

General Life Relationships Work

Published June 5, 2005 by

New day

Desparity… exaggeration. Tomorrow is a new day.

Church was good… no further descriptive words. After announcement and none of the expected someone get up to protest, things went on normally, a better normal (which happens every now and then). Amanda did a good job leading. Lots of focus on Jesus – sermon included (funny that for a church). It was what was needed. My mind returned to what I read last night…

Colossians 1:21-23
21Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.

Anyway, sat or rather participated with a somewhat better attitude than yesterday’s. Enough to say I even enjoyed myself – or rather, God. God reminding me of various stuff, thoughts in my head. Sense somewhat of community. Surprise surprise. Older guy… Ian Broadley (had to ask Nathania his name afterwards) started talking to us quite out of nowhere… mainly about workloads, YITS, uni etc… he asked about the Solomons, or rather the integration into the ‘Australian Way of Life’…. funny that 🙂 haven’t been asked that in a long while.

I got my act together this afternoon. Emailed Rowan for an extension for the Personal Creed. Hopefully my reasons are vaild enough. Wrote the Evangelism essay – which wasn’t as hard, once I worked out what the topic was talking about… Study for Doctrine test tonight and tomorrow morning over Subway… save the oral presentation for our long 40min Monday breaks x2. Must bring computer. Is it enough to suggest things are a little more under control.
🙂 for God.

I actually found the PE essay kind of interesting. What of more I’d like to do, when feasible. The topic being: Incarnational Mission relating to evangelism. Hopefully okay for a cram session maybe didn’t include enough practical examples. Read it if you like.

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Introduction

Incarnational Mission plays a key role in evangelism. John 1:14 (NIV), tells that, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” As Christians we are called to imitate the life of Jesus and by incorporating this action of the incarnate God into the act of mission, resulting in the concept of Incarnational Mission. This can be more clearly defined as, “The immersion in the life of Jesus rooted and growing in a particular context.” (Taylor, 2004) Simply put, Incarnational mission brings the concept of mission i.e. evangelism into the environment where it is most effective, amongst people in their typical culture.

Incarnational Mission

Mark Norridge states that, “Marshall McLuhan has famously said: “The medium is the message”, implying that the means of communicating the message contains a message itself. If this is indeed the case, then our efforts to communicate God’s love to God’s world can take no higher form than that which God Himself employed.” (Norridge, 2004)

The ‘means’ taking the form of anything from; overseas missionary work, by which the ‘missionary’ is called to, temporarily adopt or understand another culture (Hesselgrave, 1982: 131) to the implementation of activities undertaken by many emerging or organic churches in getting involved in their community and employing a lifestyle both Christian and culture specific.

By intentionally immersing yourself within a culture, be it modern, postmodern, western, international or other, you seek to meet the people on their level. Paul explains this well through his letter to the church at Corinth, “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews… I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” (1 Cor 9:20-22 for full text see appendix) By seeking common ground, you can be effective salt and light (Matt 5:13) where there is a genuine need in a culture that will respond far better in their apathy to ‘Christ coming to them’, than the passive act of waiting for the outside world to come to our churches.

Living out a lifestyle of this kind has implications for those involved, “Lifestyle and words go together. People notice that there is something different about us. They may put that down to our simply being nice people and Christians don’t have a monopoly on being nice! Unless we tell them why we’re different how will they know?” (Pollard, 1999: 77) So, despite Incarnational mission being, ‘to go out’ to the world in culturally appropriate ways, there needs to be words behind our motive so as to be able to adequately explain “why Christ”, and to be secure in the balance of being ‘in the world but not of the world.’ (Rom 12:2)

However, “The picture Jesus paints for his disciples is to live life with one hand clasped in the hand of God and the other reaching out to serve the needs of others.” (Posterski, 1989: 148) (Mrk 10:42-45) there are numerous examples of this both through once off youth/congregational attempts and those that seek to live Incarnational Mission daily. Be it to visit the same café a given morning of the week and seek to build relationships with the workers and other regulars, or the more drastic step of living in an unfamiliar culture and learning the ways of another.

Relationship is by far the most effective means of reaching others. Words are by no means the most effective way of communicating. Others will respond when they are both comfortable in a situation – this usually means a familiar environment, and have reached a point where they can trust the person they are listening too. A force fed measure of ‘Bible bashing’ will only make the individual on the other end resistant and will undoubtedly result in offence of an unwanted belief being shoved down their throat. By presenting a familiar lifestyle and not segregating through boundaries of foreign activity, the incarnational missionary has a far more effective means by which to live and share the truth.

Conclusion

By incorporating lifestyle into evangelistic approach, employing incarnational mission, we start placing the onus back on ourselves as Christians. Instead of our passive means of making church attractive to the world we create a situation that has relevance to outsiders. “It’s not the church that has a mission; the mission has a church.” (Morris, 1994) and as part of this church we are called to be the salt and light of Matthew 15, and follow in the footsteps of Jesus by becoming involved in the world we are called to disciple.

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Christianity Church General Life YITS

Published June 3, 2005 by

Sunlight (unabridged)

I want to remember what I saw on the train last night. Because it was remarkable and I doubt I will experience anything quite like it – very frequently. The actual feeling can’t be expressed very well, but there was something different. If I knew how to recreate it I would, over and over.

Simply.
A man and his little boy – who was probably about three got on the train. I would have normally not given them too much attention but after a while I looked up. They were deeply concentrated on eachother, the little boy was. The man was deaf and this wide eyed three year old was talking and signing, completely absorbed in his dad’s face.

What struck me more was when I looked around at the assortment of others who were intrigued by the interaction.
A middle eastern guy standing behind them, above them, an anglo younger guy sitting across the aisle, an asian student, another paint splattered worker an older lady beside/behind them, the young lady to their left, those sitting opposite them, me.

There was no hostile or cold staring environment. Absolute delight written across people’s faces. As if they’d caught this rare moment of light. All watching, unobtrusively.
Aware that others had caught the moment. Not caring. Smiling.

God, our love should be like that. I want to be completely absorbed in you. I want also to be an onlooker in others lives, to experience that joy in their focus on you. Unity in the commonality of something beautiful. Wonder at childlike facination. Saturated in a moment of how things should be.
To love like that. To live like that.

Christianity General Life On The Train

Published June 1, 2005 by

First (unabridged)

The first of June. The first day of winter.
Would I say things are normal, are satisfactory?
That the word peace applies to my live. No not in it’s entirity. Yet the fragments are begining to settle. I am in a more secure place than where I was. Complacency I don’t want. I don’t mind temporary satisfaction with limited thought. But no, I don’t think I’ve stopped exploring areas of growth, just perhaps God’s bringing a slow down capacity to it. It’s all very good to have your world flipped on end for a while, to be shaken and stretched. I guess as humans we have our limits as to what we can take (maybe even the good/growth). I’m sure God understands what we can take in and learn before the stretching reaches the uncomfortable (beyond the learning uncomfortable). I have torture instrument images in my head, ha, but I think that’s a bit violent.

Can I equate ‘peace’ with busy? Yes. I have way too much to do before the end of semester, there are so many other things I can, or would rather be doing. Peace in the fact that, I am beginning to be vastly more comfortable in being myself around YITS people. There is a certain level of trust there now. That they’ll accept you for who you are.
It’s not to say I am impressed with everyone. __ in particular. Help me to love her. To see past her attitudes, conversation topics….

The ‘slow down’. The temporary, or different perspective on self evaluation. To drop that and let it lie where it falls. To relearn the concept of knowing God and not being intentional in moulding self (to some extent). The Bible study thing came up. Reading again. Thank you God for the ways you’ve reminded me. Started back last night. Realised how much I miss it.
Be my motivation.
Be first.

Christianity General Life

Published June 1, 2005 by

Crossing post/modernism

While I have it on hand….

interesting excerpt from book: More Ready than you Realize (Brian McLaren) p.75-76

Why I should put more effort into reading, remind myself that I like being challenged, keep up that habit I let slide. Started reading intentionally last night, realised how much I’d missed it. Prayer for keeping it up would be good.

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We are used to people writing for us. Newspapers and popular magazines pitch at an eighth grade reading level, easy for all of us. Textbooks are generally written not only by knowledgeable people, but by skilled educators who pay attention to our learning styes, attention spans, and format prefrerences. Popular novels (the ones most of us read, if we read them at all) are written to be popular, and that means easy for us, accesible to us. We assume, if the Bible is in any way inspired, that the Holy Spirit would be so kind and considerate as to similarily gear it exclusively to us. Reasonable enough… at first glance. But think again. If the Bible were written for twenty-first century readers, how would it have come across to its original hearers in the sixth century BC or eight century AD?… And assuming the world is still spinning, how would a style and form targeted on a twenty-first centruy demographic cohort feel for advanced readers in the twenty-ninth century?

It is hard for us, spoiled as we are by being marketing targest, but the Bible askes us to rise above our narrow parochial tastes. It asks us to learn, to understand, to imaginatively enter an alien geography… alien cultures… and social structures. It asks us to stop absolutizing our perspective and, instead, to see our modern or postmodern view points simply as views from a point – limited, contingent, changing, not privileged. In so doing, the very form of the Bible begins teaching us something about humility and perspective.

Christianity General Life