Heard my Bishop state this today, and thought it was worth repeating. Wish I could think of something else to write, but it's been a LOOOOONG conference. I did get appointed Associate Pastor of williams. But that seems almost anticlimactic. There were so many things happening at Conference, but I can barely keep my eyes open.
...but it seems I can't go to sleep without writing on what it means to live a life that is holy and acceptable to God. I've just come back from a weeklong conference where people have outward displays of religiosity -- where people "act holy," if you will. But what about our hearts? Am I the only one who senses a disconnect between some of the things people say or their ecstatic expressions within the boundaries of church, versus things that happen OUTside the church?
This inside/outside thing has come up for me lately as I sat beside someone who has some mobility challenges. The person I sat beside was not the only person in the room with such challenges; one man (who had stood and cooked for many years) had a recent below-knee amputation. While my friend and I discussed it, the proud older man with the below-knee amputation turned his scooter around and left the assembly when this guy got up and made an incredibly insensitive joke about someone having their leg amputated and not having a leg to stand on.
It's not the crassness that gets me. If you're operating under the gifts of the spirit, wouldn't the spirit first prevent you from saying something that could be hurtful to your brother or sister? That brings me to the original question: What does it mean to live a life that is holy and acceptable to God? There are external things we can do: we can go to church and pretend to pray and give our tithes and offerings and visit the sick and all that. But when we go to church and the Spirit of the Lord descends upon us and begins to point things out to us -- when we pray and we take our problems and concerns and cares to the Lord and leave them there -- when we give our tithes even when we can't see our way clear to do so, trusting only that God's GRACE is sufficient to supply all our needs -- when we visit the sick and find that, while we came to comfort them, we leave with them having strengthened us -- when we begin to allow the Holy Spirit not only to enter in, bu to TRANSFORM our hearts and minds and bodies and spirits and ACTIONS, perhaps then we can begin to learn how to live a life that is holy and acceptable to God.
But until we take an honest look at how we're living, a look that is not colored by our status or by what we "want" our condition to be -- until we take a look at ourselves from the point of view of "the least of these," then perhaps we don't have a clear picture of what we're working with. And if we don't have a clear picture of what we're working with, how can we have a clear understanding of the work we need to do?
I need to get to a sports doctor to figure out why my legs cramp all the time. I need to create a couple of CME polity courses for NYTS that we can offer at District and Annual conferences. I need to plan a CME Trip for which students can receive NYTS credit. And once the agency is headed to a more stable place, I need to start on a Ph.D. in Church History. A good place to start would be to get one of those underwater mp3 players and study my Hebrew while I swim, since I also need to do some swimming interval training and get my VO2 up....
Glorify God. Just Do It.
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