Struck

Struck – during this night – by something deep and simple:

That for the church to become ‘ecclesia’ – true church – carrying the life that the maker intended, there has to be a simple transformation that we all need to undergo.

People need, intentionally, to begin to create connections, networks that carry goodness between one another: sharing kindnesses, goods, life itself.

It can’t just be left to ‘happen’ because for too long here in the wealthy cosy corners of the West, we have had so many distractions, so many images to flcker up on our screens to make us think that we are doing ‘real church’ with our beautful worship, perfect preaches and joyous gatherings..

Left exhausted by the trail of church attendance we are left chasing after something and we don’t know what it is.

Returning home, I skip into my sofa and sleep. Forgetting – if I ever knew – that what really matters are intentional choices of love.

‘If you can’t love your neighbour, who you can see, how can you love God who you can’t?’

I woke with the gentle understanding that as we choose to become, to embody change of heart towards the ones we know and reach out to form unseen networks of care and love, we will – in the darkness – create networks of light, of life.

It doesn’t matter who we reach out to but it’s imortant that we reach out to our neighbours, who we can see – nieghbours are the ones we are placed next to. Not ‘deserving’ (any more than we/I was deserving of God breaking ion on my existence 30 years ago) but simply ‘existing’ next to us.

And our job? To listen, to hear, to find a niche, a place where somehow what we have can be received by them, for them: whatever we or I have, whatever unique gifts or substance we have to offer into the place of their need, we can do it. Even if they have no ‘need’, ours is to be a presence, a fragrance for them to smell, like some primal odour that only our spirit expresses – and their spirit understands. Ours is to laugh, to listen, to be still with them, to hear their heart and share ours, living expansively through God and speaking deeply to the substance of who they are.

I am, we are called to do good in the land, here where we live, where we stand, where we walk, work, live. Unpacking and releasing all the goodness that by warrant of His goodness we carry. Releasing it into the lives of others. Like salt leaking into the land, killing off the stench of death and waste and fear, bringing supernatural heat and light, like ground penetrating radar, infra-red, lighting up dark places and expelling shadows of lives that are dominated by dark things.

We are shafts of light.