Post high-school I have not been a huge church-goer. Like many young people of today I have been challenged in finding a place of worship I feel comfortable with. Another reason why I think it has been a challenge to get to church is because of my lack of time and priorities. For awhile Jay and I were regularly attending different churches trying them on for size. Now that we have weddings on the weekends and other numerous tasks and social engagements, etc. written all over the calendar going to church has not been on the top of our list. I need to change that somehow. I'm glad that this upcoming weekend both Jay and I are in the same place and can make time for church.
For those who know me, beyond my time and priorities excuse, just the challenge of "what do I believe in" is hard enough to get me to church sometimes. However if I know one thing its that I believe in community and a lot of churches are just that. And if I put community high on my priorities list, church surely won't fall short.
As I have been cleaning through scraps of paper and memories in my home I found some "worship notes" I wrote down from a January 2010 visit I made to the Santuary. A good girlfriend of mine introduced me to this church community and so far I have to say it is my favorite church I have attended, and I have been there a handful of times and have not been disappointed once. I always feel so good after going and love the sermons, songs, people and hand-clapping and booty shakin'. Who doesn't love a good hand clap or booty-shake, really?
The message that I wanted to record(so that I can recycle the note I found today) is about compassion. Pastor Efrem Smith was speaking on Advancing the Kingdom of God, and in his message he mentioned that it takes compassion to share your resources, but more important that it takes Kingdom compassion to know that they are not your resources in the first place. I remember writing this message down because I think it's relevant and powerful. This idea of ownership is taking over our society. We either won't take ownership/responsibility or we are too-proud-owners and unwilling to share the wealth with others. Where is the middle ground?
To me the idea of ownership in a way is just an illusion. Nobody owns the oceans, the land or the Earth. Really, nobody does, however we go around with the illusion that we do and that we can make profits from these things. Or maybe we are such proud owners of x,y, and z products. And sure, we did pay for them/earn them or whatever, but so what? I feel like such emphasis on ownership really separates us. What I liked about the message from the pastor is that he reminds us that whether you bought your way to where you are through hard work and sweat or whether you claimed something yours that was not yours, your gifts you "own" today have been given to you and are not necessarily meant for you but meant to be shared. In a way then, they are not really yours, but belong to the collective, the community that gave you the opportunities and the growth. We often forget how many resources and privileges we have that were never ours to begin with and it is important to remember this piece of wisdom and be humbled a bit.
I wrote these notes down because it feels good to change the perspective of generosity from simply elevating oneself to just opening oneself to the strength of the collective. It feels good to realize that you are part of something and that there really is no separation between the giver and the gifted. It feels good to be compassionate, even if it is not an act that belongs to me or that I own.
Which reminds me of a quote from Into the Wild about sharing and the human experience, that the main character McCandless wrote while he grew lonelier and more desperate in nature, "And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging without a ripple, is genuine life, and that unshared happiness is not happiness...And this was the most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED" (Krakauer, p.189).
No comments:
Post a Comment