Categories: uncategorized
Date: 10 January 2005 12:33:18
Not something i'm very good at doing. Yesterday we had some friends over who specifically wanted to go to our church. They weren't "straightforward" friends either - certainly not deliberately awkward, but complicated. Was amazed by how much I was clenching my little fists and "willing" the church service NOT TO BE WEIRD. I guess I'm trying to be a little like Roald Dahl's Matilda - only instead of trying to push over glasses, I'm trying to stop the church leader obsessing on and on about Jerry Springer and trying to force the man in front of me to stop doing star jumps for the Lord (not entirely sure what that's about, but he could front a whole new type of aerobics video).
If I really wanted church not to be weird, I could have picked a better week, to be honest. We had a visiting prophet (is it PC to call a female prophet a prophetess, or not?). She could have said anything. Actually, I don't think she was that bad. But that's not the point. There was also a Bring and Share lunch which, for various reasons, it wasn't appropriate to bring these people to, but the random barbecuing in the playground outside added to the morning's bizarreness.
In the end, I don't think any of this mattered. When I heard the most fantastic sermon I've heard for ages about "stonethrowing crowds", which I blogged about at the time, one of the other bits of it that struck me was that the man also said we had to relax and expect God to give people the right things instead of the wrong ones. I'm a little bit of a control freak (think my husband would call that an understatement), and i'm not very good at trusting God to speak to people even in the midst of the very human chaos which is our church. But He does, and He's big enough not to need me to spend all morning obsessing about Mr Starjump and the slapdash tambourine playing from the front. I had a very powerful example of this recently when I went to get some bible notes, actually, for one of the same people. The only ones left focussed wildly on pain and suffering, and I thought "I can't give him these, that's just awful", but they were totally the right thing.
Ok. God's big, I'm small. I'm also not very good at letting him just get on with it. But I'm learning. And I can't even push glasses over with my eyes, so I'm not very likely to be able to control random prophetesses with them.
I didn't watch Jerry Springer - not because I was bothered by it - i actually wanted to see it at the theatre when I came out, but because we were busy. Now i've heard everyone going on about it from both sides, I don't know what to think. I tend to try and focus on being For things rather than Against them, but maybe I am a bit too tolerant sometimes? Partly because I wasn't brought up Christian, and partly because of the nature of my job and friends I just don't notice blasphemous stuff very much, and would be really embarassed to speak out against it. Maybe I should be less blase about such things?