Today’s Lectionary Readings: Psalm 22:25-31; Acts 7:55-60; John 14:1-14; 1 Peter 2:2-10; Psalm 90
Most folks I meet these days have no idea what I thought my original call was. Twenty years ago I thought my call was to teach history in high school. That’s why my undergraduate degree was in Social Sciences. Of course, things didn’t turn out exactly the way I expected them to when I was 20. That would be the subject of another entry... Anyway, one thing that most fascinated me about history was the way we human being constantly try to clean up history by re-writing it. For instance, we’ll talk a lot about Abraham Lincoln being a great leader and yet we’ll conveniently leave out the fact that this great leader lost more than one election on his road to greatness. So why do we feel compelled to clean up history? I guess it’s our tendency to want to make noteworthy figures a little more socially acceptable. In the midst of these cleansing processes, we forget the words from today’s passage from 1 Peter that remind us a huge part of our call is “to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you – from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted” (1 Peter 2:10 - The Message). The importance of telling the whole story was reinforced in today’s passage from Acts when we were reminded once again of the sordid personal history of one of the giants of our faith – Paul! Every time we try to clean up either our personal histories or the personal histories of others, we cheat ourselves out of the opportunity to share with other “the night-and-day difference” God has made in our lives. Today, I invite you to think about sharing your personal UNEDITED faith journey with a loved one. You won’t just be re-claiming pieces of your story that you might have previously lost or forgotten about; you’ll be revealing another radical dimension of God’s grace that has been active in your life. Til next time…
Most folks I meet these days have no idea what I thought my original call was. Twenty years ago I thought my call was to teach history in high school. That’s why my undergraduate degree was in Social Sciences. Of course, things didn’t turn out exactly the way I expected them to when I was 20. That would be the subject of another entry... Anyway, one thing that most fascinated me about history was the way we human being constantly try to clean up history by re-writing it. For instance, we’ll talk a lot about Abraham Lincoln being a great leader and yet we’ll conveniently leave out the fact that this great leader lost more than one election on his road to greatness. So why do we feel compelled to clean up history? I guess it’s our tendency to want to make noteworthy figures a little more socially acceptable. In the midst of these cleansing processes, we forget the words from today’s passage from 1 Peter that remind us a huge part of our call is “to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you – from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted” (1 Peter 2:10 - The Message). The importance of telling the whole story was reinforced in today’s passage from Acts when we were reminded once again of the sordid personal history of one of the giants of our faith – Paul! Every time we try to clean up either our personal histories or the personal histories of others, we cheat ourselves out of the opportunity to share with other “the night-and-day difference” God has made in our lives. Today, I invite you to think about sharing your personal UNEDITED faith journey with a loved one. You won’t just be re-claiming pieces of your story that you might have previously lost or forgotten about; you’ll be revealing another radical dimension of God’s grace that has been active in your life. Til next time…
No comments:
Post a Comment