Resilient Service
Donald Honig was quoted in Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend observing, "Putting Willie Mays in a small ballpark would be like cutting a masterpiece to fit a frame."
As ready as we are to find parallels between the national pastime and life in general, I wonder if we don't ill use that sort of reasoning. Our application, spelled out, would be that given our cavernous outfield to cover, we would suddenly have the capability to do so. We are confined, we tell ourselves, by our limited opportunities. We are, we think, waiting to be discovered.
Then there is Stephen in the Bible's Book of Acts. We may know his earthly end as the first Christian martyr and employ similar thinking to the above. We may tell ourselves that if our most cherished beliefs were questioned, we would give a great speech and give our lives for what we believe in. Stephen, though, is shown differently. Before expounding on the ways in which the Old Testament points to Christ, forgiving his accusers, and being stoned in Acts 7, he is present in Acts 6. He is singled out there for great faith before his life is ever required. Yes, he does great signs and wonders according to that chapter, but his great faith is often manifested in a way we might learn from more readily. He is one of those chosen to see to the feeding of contentious widows.
If he can show, and refine, and deepen great faith while volunteering in food service toward those so needy they may have been deprived of much of their dignity and peace of mind, do we need a so-called big ballpark in order to demonstrate a range of great faith? Before martyrdom at the end of Acts 7, Stephen's reputation in the community was exemplary at the beginning of Acts 6. There are enough small, daily decisions to keep us busy and , without preoccupying us, to keep us from using our energy to dream grandiose screams of what we WOULD do in a hypothetical situation. As he cultivates a good reputation under sometimes hostile scrutiny, even Stephen's facial expression is so different that it is exemplary. The Bible says his face shines like an angel.
Unless we are unusually disciplined or hypocritical, our faces will reflect our thoughts. In all cases, Pastor Alan Wright asserts, our emotions ARE perfectly obedient servants to those thoughts. Where we are so focused on the ending we would like, or think we deserve, our face won't shine. Where we see each chapter and each day, whether teaching or serving in more mundane matters, as an expression of our grateful, growing identity, we may outlast the limitations of any given situation.
As ready as we are to find parallels between the national pastime and life in general, I wonder if we don't ill use that sort of reasoning. Our application, spelled out, would be that given our cavernous outfield to cover, we would suddenly have the capability to do so. We are confined, we tell ourselves, by our limited opportunities. We are, we think, waiting to be discovered.
Then there is Stephen in the Bible's Book of Acts. We may know his earthly end as the first Christian martyr and employ similar thinking to the above. We may tell ourselves that if our most cherished beliefs were questioned, we would give a great speech and give our lives for what we believe in. Stephen, though, is shown differently. Before expounding on the ways in which the Old Testament points to Christ, forgiving his accusers, and being stoned in Acts 7, he is present in Acts 6. He is singled out there for great faith before his life is ever required. Yes, he does great signs and wonders according to that chapter, but his great faith is often manifested in a way we might learn from more readily. He is one of those chosen to see to the feeding of contentious widows.
If he can show, and refine, and deepen great faith while volunteering in food service toward those so needy they may have been deprived of much of their dignity and peace of mind, do we need a so-called big ballpark in order to demonstrate a range of great faith? Before martyrdom at the end of Acts 7, Stephen's reputation in the community was exemplary at the beginning of Acts 6. There are enough small, daily decisions to keep us busy and , without preoccupying us, to keep us from using our energy to dream grandiose screams of what we WOULD do in a hypothetical situation. As he cultivates a good reputation under sometimes hostile scrutiny, even Stephen's facial expression is so different that it is exemplary. The Bible says his face shines like an angel.
Unless we are unusually disciplined or hypocritical, our faces will reflect our thoughts. In all cases, Pastor Alan Wright asserts, our emotions ARE perfectly obedient servants to those thoughts. Where we are so focused on the ending we would like, or think we deserve, our face won't shine. Where we see each chapter and each day, whether teaching or serving in more mundane matters, as an expression of our grateful, growing identity, we may outlast the limitations of any given situation.
First martyr... Stephen? Or Christ?
ReplyDeleteI confess I groaned internally at the name Willie Mays (another baseball analogy!?), but you pulled it together so well that I retract my intended word of warning that with too much of that you risk losing those of us who don't love baseball.
Last paragraph, a reference to what we think we deserve... Nearly all of us get so much better than we deserve: we just refuse to see it.
Speaking of Mays, I have a challenge for you. Step out of the diamond-shaped comfort zone, read up a little on QUEEN guitarist, electrical engineer, and astrophysicist Brian May, and see what we have to learn from him, whose guitar tone was "too big" for clubs and pubs, hence QUEEN's "arena rock" subgenre.
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