I was thinking today about the meaningful conversations that we have had during our Sunday school class. As you might remember, the class and I are reading the book Better Together: Discover the Power of Community. With the events at the capital, and the polarizing community from which we live and work, the conversations have been rich. In the first two weeks of our class we have addressed some hard topics, and I am happy say, we have not solved anything. Instead we have chosen to be comfortable without having to formulate the 'correct’ response to these moments of instances. That is not to say that we have denied them, or chosen to associate them with ’those people.’
As I listen to the members of our class, I can tell that they are engaging the topic at a deep level while still understanding that some issues are too big for a Sunday school class to fix. It has been a blessing to participate and lead these discussions.
With the discussion from this past Sunday still fresh in my mind, I read the words of Dr. King today and they affirmed to me that we are on the right path here at Plains. He said:
"Rarely do we find men [and women] who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."
When I read the news, or consider what I see in the world around me, I begin to agree all the more with Dr. King. We do seek, ‘half-baked solutions’ to many issues. Many people want a quick fix to problems that years of neglect created. Solid thinking has taken the place of ‘click bait,’ and I find myself being swallowed up more and more into the mire of it. I can scarcely read or watch anything related to current events without it spiraling into a game of assigning blame. Certainly, blame is part of repentance—we do confess our sins each week as we examine our lives. But seldom, in my experience, do we engage the long, hard work of solid, introspective thinking.
This takes me back to our discussion group on the book Better Together. From the very beginning of our time together, then temptation existed to ’solve’ the problem or assign blame. While we may have started down that path, it did not take long of the class to, on its own, seek solutions that are creative and adaptive to what we see outside our windows and watch on TV. We did not create a large-scale solution that everyone should just believe it. Neither did we cast blame directly. We talked about sin and we talked about righteous living and faithful expressions that God calls from us. That conversation ended with a desire to find a project in the church that was service oriented.
We knew that we were not going to fix anything, and so rather than try to fix the world, we wondered what would it look like if we found something small, something personally applicable, that we could do together? Like building an outdoor chapel. . .
The class ended without a solution, but the solid thinking led us down a new path that I had not imagined when I sat down. And so I wonder, where is that place of sold, hard thinking happening in your life? What would it look like to find that place and then determine a personal way to implement what you and God learned together?
Blessings
Rev. Derek
No comments:
Post a Comment