Life in the Center

Growing up in Canada I always felt a little outside the center. It was always clear that the US was the center of Western culture. From a global view all of the US, Canada and Western Europe are the center.

I read a great article the other night. I was going through my old magazines as part of spring cleaning and stumbled on this article in a Christianity Today from last summer. It's exactly what I've been looking for.

Rt. Rev. Dr. David Zac Niringiye talks about the dangers of being at the center. He explains that throughout scripture God was always outside the center. Jesus came to earth far out of the center.

As North American Christians he says we are at a disadvantage in understanding Jesus because we don't have that experience of being at the margins. His suggestion is that all North American Christians spend time globally at the margins - not to "fix" the rest of the world or to "bring God" to the rest of the world, but to realize that the margin is where God is and if we want to be with God, that's where we need to be.

I've been trying to explain to my church that sending people to Africa isn't to try to evangelize Africa (the church there is growing much faster than the church in my area), it's to transform our people by stepping outside our comfortable world and seeing God working in other parts of the world.

"One of the gravest threats to the North American church is the deception of power - the deception of power - the deception of being at the center. Those at the center tend to think, 'The future belongs to us. We are the shapers of tomorrow. The process of gospel transmission, the process of mission - all of it is on our terms, because we are powerful, because we are established. We have a track record of success, after all.'"

How often do we the US as shaping the world? How often do we say things like "the future belongs to us"?

If God is working far from the center, let's go be with Him.

Further Proof That God Has a Sense of Humor

As if I needed more proof....

Yesterday I was running late on everything and I was about to go into a meeting, but I really needed to print out the UPS shipping slips for the latest round of Caregiver Kit boxes. Of course, I couldn't find the sheet with the list of how many kits were in each box. I knew I had brought it that morning and I remembered putting it in my purse.

Of course, being in a hurry, I couldn't find anything. I grew more and more frantic as I started tearing apart my office in search of the scrap of paper (anyone who's seen my office will know that's a bit of a fruitless search).

As I'm becoming more frantic I realize I've got a song stuck in my head, in the bad way. I'm too busy to figure out what it is because, darn it, I'm busy. And frantic. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Finally I take a breath and stop to figure out what it is. It's "Great is Thy Faithfulness". Over and over in my head. While I'm tearing up my office and getting increasingly angry at why there have been so many little stumbles on this project and why it keeps eating up more and more of my time.

Finally I see the irony in my franticness, frustration and the song in my head.

And, of course, immediately I find the slip of paper.

Sigh. You would think that I'd learn. It was like God giving me a smack and saying "Listen Goober".

Better or Better?

It's amazing how I can feel fine when I'm at my house and even start feeling guilty for staying home when I'm not really sick. Then, I go in to work and within an hour I'm at death's doorstep again. I feel awful and the afternoon has only started. How can I be so tired when all I do is sleep?

Luckily my catch up has included reading two week's worth of Dilbert cartoons. That part is easy. Actual catch up is going to be much harder. Especially if I don't get rid of this bug!

In other news, run, don't walk to the 268 Generation site to see Beth Moore's talk from yesterday morning at the Passion conference on Humility.

Divine Simplicity

For my "Christmas" post I'm borrowing a quote from Bono that my brother posted last year. My personal theme for this year has been divine simplicity and it really was started by reading this quote last year:

I remember coming back from a very long tour. I hadn't been at home. Got home
for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin. Dublin at Christmas is cold, but
it's lit up, it's like Carnival in the cold. On Christmas Eve, I went to St.
Patrick's Cathedral. I went to this place, sat. I was given a really bad seat,
behind one of the huge pillars. I couldn't see anything. I was sitting there,
having come back from Tokyo, or something like that. I went for the singing,
because I love choral singing. Community arts, a specialty! But I was falling
asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the
service, and I just started nodding off, I couldn't see a thing. Then I started
to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page. It dawned on me for
the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the
Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the
universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would
seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw
poverty, in shit and straw ... a child ... I just thought "Wow!" Just the poetry
... Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable.
There it was. I was sitting there, and it's not that it hadn't struck me before,
but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of
picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this: love needs to
find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It's pure
logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It's inevitable. Love has to become an
action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an
incarnation. Love must be made flesh.