Categories: uncategorized
Date: 26 May 2006 15:41:29
I had a Tom Jones moment: a strange woman threw some underwear at me.
It was while I was dropping Cambuslang off at school. To be fair, although the woman is strange, she is a friend of ours. And her son had come round to play the other day when we had the paddling pool out. So he had borrowed a pair of swimming trunks from us... Still, it attracted some funny looks from other people in the playground. They will now, no doubt, draw an obvious conclusion from our exchanging underwear, and have a very low opinion of our morals. This will, in turn, undermine any Christian witness we attempt to give. So, er, I suppose we shouldn't have got the paddling pool out?
I was once in a church where such thinking was compulsory. For example, if a young bloke needed accommodation then no female in the church could offer to put them up, for fear that the neighbours would think that some sexual immorality was taking place.
At the time it struck me as absurd, and I still don't think it's right to be as paranoid about appearances as they were. But is it totally inconceivable that neighbours might see a young male leaving the house and come to the wrong conclusion, and so assume that all Christians were hypocrites and not worth listening to? (Actually, my view on Christianity is that it's a hypocrites licence, in a very positive sense, but that's another story).