Taught In Technicolor
If C.S. Lewis has any insight into it, the demons delighted in my state of mind on Sunday. His fictional master tempter in Screwtape Letters calls on his inexperienced nephew to foster in humans, "an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men." Unfortunately, this trail of sulfur follows me into church, at which point I attempt to cover it with the incense of religious excuses.
For the fellow men, women, and children in my congregation, what concerns the great mass of them this time of year is Operation Christmas Child. It's part of the unofficial liturgy this time of year. Operation Christmas Child extends holiday giddiness for those who do giddy by a full two months. The emphasis on the church-wide preparation of shoeboxes full of gifts for children in the Third World is hard for any but the expert curmudgeon to disparage, but I was managing. I told myself during the extended announcements portion of our service that I craved the straight teaching of God's Word. Even so, He managed to teach me before the "official" teaching got started.
As with God's instructions to the prophet Ezekiel, He managed to get His point past the innured sensibilities of His overly religious and overly textual audience with a skit. For Ezekiel, this meant packing for a journey, or subsisting on starvation rations, or building a model. Without that kind of time, my flock showed the extent of its zeal with teenagers dressed up as crayon boxes and other school supplies. Yes, the same subset for whom image is supposedly all-important has its remnant that is willing to do more than blend in. Perhaps, as King David responded to another critical voice in his life, these teens were pledged to be even more undignified than this if that's what was required to differentiate glory of God from the fleeting assent of those looking for sameness. I couldn't help but notice.
My eyes lured from my phone and toward the stage where they should have been focused, God had even more distinct ways to show me His glory in a brief "commercial" that wasn't what I categorized as worship or what looked like teaching. Across the stage, in front of the dancing crayon boxes, came a variety of kids with their shoebox offerings destined for different parts of the world. Joining those pilgrims on the platform was a young adult with cerebral palsy who was also commandeering her resistant limbs to deliver her shoebox. I've been where she was. I've seen precious service seconds drop off in the monitors facing the stage. I've heard of things that speakers wanted to include but could not in the time allotted. THIS walk across the stage, however long it took, was something in which the Lord and those He designated to plan His service took individualized delight. The time in the service for her to personally deliver her offering spoke to me in ways that another participant balancing a mountain of shoeboxes laden with gold could not. This was the Lord's Church honoring the shoebox equivalent of the widow's mites to which Jesus directed the attention of the centuries.
At least two people had to be willing in order for that unforgettable offering to take place. Invite me, also a person with cerebral palsy, to participate in such a spectacle, and I will FIND a reason to decline. I'll diffidently tell you I'm not worthy, and I may even partially convince myself that humility is my motive. What I am thinking when others invite, when others complement, when others offer to assist, is that I'm being made a special case for their own purposes. As much as I would talk in counselorspeak when I was working about assuming the best about what's behind others' decisions, I would be all too ready to assign an ulterior motive to somebody seeking to validate me as a man made in the image of God to His exact, if different, specifications. Those corrosive thoughts may not have occurred to the young lady making her way across the stage, or she may have uprooted them by long practice. Her faithfulness to walk her physically unsteady walk with brothers and sisters in Christ watching showed me what faith looks like.
For the fellow men, women, and children in my congregation, what concerns the great mass of them this time of year is Operation Christmas Child. It's part of the unofficial liturgy this time of year. Operation Christmas Child extends holiday giddiness for those who do giddy by a full two months. The emphasis on the church-wide preparation of shoeboxes full of gifts for children in the Third World is hard for any but the expert curmudgeon to disparage, but I was managing. I told myself during the extended announcements portion of our service that I craved the straight teaching of God's Word. Even so, He managed to teach me before the "official" teaching got started.
As with God's instructions to the prophet Ezekiel, He managed to get His point past the innured sensibilities of His overly religious and overly textual audience with a skit. For Ezekiel, this meant packing for a journey, or subsisting on starvation rations, or building a model. Without that kind of time, my flock showed the extent of its zeal with teenagers dressed up as crayon boxes and other school supplies. Yes, the same subset for whom image is supposedly all-important has its remnant that is willing to do more than blend in. Perhaps, as King David responded to another critical voice in his life, these teens were pledged to be even more undignified than this if that's what was required to differentiate glory of God from the fleeting assent of those looking for sameness. I couldn't help but notice.
My eyes lured from my phone and toward the stage where they should have been focused, God had even more distinct ways to show me His glory in a brief "commercial" that wasn't what I categorized as worship or what looked like teaching. Across the stage, in front of the dancing crayon boxes, came a variety of kids with their shoebox offerings destined for different parts of the world. Joining those pilgrims on the platform was a young adult with cerebral palsy who was also commandeering her resistant limbs to deliver her shoebox. I've been where she was. I've seen precious service seconds drop off in the monitors facing the stage. I've heard of things that speakers wanted to include but could not in the time allotted. THIS walk across the stage, however long it took, was something in which the Lord and those He designated to plan His service took individualized delight. The time in the service for her to personally deliver her offering spoke to me in ways that another participant balancing a mountain of shoeboxes laden with gold could not. This was the Lord's Church honoring the shoebox equivalent of the widow's mites to which Jesus directed the attention of the centuries.
At least two people had to be willing in order for that unforgettable offering to take place. Invite me, also a person with cerebral palsy, to participate in such a spectacle, and I will FIND a reason to decline. I'll diffidently tell you I'm not worthy, and I may even partially convince myself that humility is my motive. What I am thinking when others invite, when others complement, when others offer to assist, is that I'm being made a special case for their own purposes. As much as I would talk in counselorspeak when I was working about assuming the best about what's behind others' decisions, I would be all too ready to assign an ulterior motive to somebody seeking to validate me as a man made in the image of God to His exact, if different, specifications. Those corrosive thoughts may not have occurred to the young lady making her way across the stage, or she may have uprooted them by long practice. Her faithfulness to walk her physically unsteady walk with brothers and sisters in Christ watching showed me what faith looks like.
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