Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 December 2005 03:54:09
Part 2.
The Workplace.
Why bother thinking about the workplace when we are relaxing on a church camp contemplating “living life to the full”?
Here, I read a couple of paragraphs from “The Shaping of Things to Come” by Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch p.126 as follows:
“When reading the Pentateuch, one is immediately struck by the radical non-linear logic associated with it. One verse deals with the Israelite's approach to God in the temple. The very next verse deals with what one does when one's donkey falls into a pit. The next might deal with mildew in the kitchen etc...It seems to be radically discontinuous and generally lacks the sequential reason that we look for in a text. What is going on here?...
We (the authors) suggest that there is indeed a rather profound logic going on in the Torah, a logic that attempts to relate all aspects of life to God. Therefore, everything -ONE'S WORK (emphasis mine), one's domestic life, one's health, ones worship - has the same significance to God. God is concerned with every aspect of the believer's life. Not even the mildew is insignificant. While in the Western spiritual tradition we have tended to see the “religious” as one category of life among many, the Hebrew mind incorporated “religious” existence into all of life. As such there is no distinction whatsoever between the secular and the sacred in the Hebrew worldview. All of life is sacred when it is placed in relationship to the living God.”
So, I said, we should be talking about our working lives as part of a church camp, especially one themed on “living life to the full”
Stay tuned for Part3