Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 28 – Saturday after 4th Sunday of Lent 

To Read:

‘You awake, Fynn?’

‘What’s up, Tich?’

‘Full up!’

‘Oh.’

A little sob brought the guards [The cat and the dog] tramping up my chest in order to size up the situation.  The sniffs lasted a few moments longer whilst I thumbed through the events of the last day or so, trying to figure out the possible reason for the tears.

… Nothing was going to stop it, so resigning myself to the inevitable, I invited her to proceed with, ‘All right, so going to church is like mending a radio.  I agree.  I agree, only tell me about it slowly – nice and slowly.’

Well, first you put the box outside, then you put the box inside.  That’s like people in church – they keep outside and they ought to go inside.’

‘People’, she paused to let this sink in, ‘when they go to church’, another lengthy pause, ‘measure Mister God from the outside.’  She hacked at my shins with her toes in order to stress this point.  ‘They don’t get inside and measure Mister God.’  She waited patiently, waited to see if these ideas had caught fire somewhere.

As a supposed Christian you can stand outside and measure Mister God.  The meter doesn’t read voltages, it reads ‘Loving, Kindness, All-powerful, Omnipotent, etc.’  You have a nice lot of labels to stick about the place.  So far so good.  Now what’s the next step?  Oh yes, now I open up the Christian circuit and pop me, the meter, inside.  Seems simple enough, nothing to it really – Hey, wait a blessed minute!  Who was it that said, ‘Be like your heavenly Father’?  Quiet that man, I’ve nearly solved the problem.  If I’m inside the Christian circuit, then I’m a part of – a real part of Mister God, a working part of Mister God.

‘You mean I can think I’m a Christian.  I can measure God from the outside and say he’s all-loving and all-powerful and all that, but really I’m a dead duck?’

I pressed on with, ‘So if I get into the circuit and measure Mister God that way, then I’m a real Christian?’  She waggled her head.  Sideways.

So far as Anna was concerned one thing was absolutely certain.  Mister God had made everything, there was nothing that God hadn’t made.  When you began to see what it was all about, how things worked, how things were put together, then you were beginning to understand what Mister God was.

From the Scriptures:

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰ and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹ In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all!  (Colossians 3v9-11)

To Reflect:

Yes, yes, yes!   Anna has it all sorted and worked out.  The problem with the world around us and the challenge people of faith face everyday is this.  We spend far too much time measuring things when if we really know that Mister God is in our middle and in the middle of everyone else then we don’t need to measure nuffink! 

Labels, even apparently good labels such as, ‘Loving, Kindness, All-powerful, Omnipotent,’are not at all helpful.  At their best they limit the extent of a good thing and we think we are safe instead of being saved.  At their worst they simply exclude and destroy and both the judge and the judged are lost.

To be on the inside, to realise that Mister God is in our middle and in the middle of everyone means that the need to measure falls away as it serves no purpose other than to separate and divide.  We are all called to be ‘working parts of Mister God’.  When we grasp that then the supposed differences between us, which down the years have been used to do almost everything except prove that Mister God is in our middle, melt away as the morning mist does at sunrise.

Every time we exclude anyone, and especially so on grounds of differences in belief or faith, we tell Mister God that there is no space for love in our middle and everyone dies. 

Edwin Markham’s poem ‘Outwitted’ says it all.

He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!”

 

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