Relationships: I Become More and More Convinced That They Are the Most Important Things

This morning in church I realized that, if I want to have relationships, I shall have to pursue them. I also noted that relationships are important to me. I want to become more aware of the ways in which people are brought into my life. I want to be more purposeful in the way that I pursue them. This point was carried home within the context of the Bible study I attended just this evening.

I figure that the moment I acknowledge an individual's presence in my life, I should see this as a sign that the Holy Spirit desires to act through me in some way. After all, my acquaintances fall under my sphere of influence as Stephen Covey would describe things.

I had a gift to take to a young woman in my church who recently had had a baby. As I contemplated my desire to visit her in the hospital, I became aware that I was acquainted with a nurse who worked delivery, and that she herself would be expecting her own baby at any time. This nurse had been a classmate of mine in high school. She and I were never close, in fact we were not even friends, but my feeling toward her had changed since Parker came into my world. Parker has changed all sorts of things, which is part and parcel of his status as a gift from God. I had a gift to give to her as well.

I wrote this nurse a card in which I told her that if she ever needed to talk she could phone me. I told her that complaints were welcome, as I know from my own experience that sometimes you simply need someone to talk to when times are hard. Sometimes you need someone to whine to other than your husband. I was fortunate in that I had such a friend, after Parker was born, and I have long desired to continue to be such a friend to others who are in need. Unfortunately you only rarely come across anyone who will take you up on such an offer. I myself am guilty of ignoring the offers of those who have reached out to me. Perhaps I should contact these saints and beg of them their forgiveness.

Perhaps I shall as I become more and more convicted of these things. But it is late.

Something to Think About

One of the first things I learned when I entered the Interior Design Program at The University of Alabama was that in certain philosophies of interior design ornamentation should carry meaning, an idea which certainly appealed to me. This was a response against those earlier design philosophies such as French Rococo which said that if a little ornamentation was good, more ornamentation was even better.

The subject came up when I was on Spring Break Outreach with Chi Alpha at Florida State University my Senior Year of College.

We had done a mime routine a bit earlier, and were fitted out in black clothes and white make-up. I wandered with one of our guys around the green searching for students to talk to.

"Why the white make-up?" a young man asked. We explained to him what we had been doing, talked a little bit about University life, as well as our designated courses of study, those things all students have in common. There was a pause, and I said to him, "You know, in interior design I learned that all ornamentation should carry meaning, and yet here I am wearing white make-up. It has no meaning. In a sense this make-up is a violation of my principles as a Christian, one of which is to be honest and transparent in the way that I face the world. What do you think of that?"

From the outside this may not seem like much of an evangelical message, but I believe it opened up the conversation and showed this guy that we were willing to treat him like an actual person we had met instead of as a stop on some imaginary evangelical pilgrimage. (It must have been the work of the Holy Spirit, because I am not very evangelical as a rule.)

I'm thinking about this incident in a couple of ways as we approach the subject of relationship evangelism at Grace Church in the following weeks.

In one sense I'd like us to discuss how ornamentation carries meaning in our lives as Christians as we face the world from day to day. Lauren Winner has a lovely little book called Mudhouse Sabbath that applies to this in some ways. It talks about ways that certain Jewish traditions can be profitably incorporated by the Church.

The other way I'd like to discuss this is in terms of different evangelical techniques that we have tried, the ways that they have been effective, when they are appropriate and when they are not. Mime, for example, can work beautifully in some cases, and in others it may be offensive (in a detrimental way: remember not all offense is detrimental) because it uses artifice to convey an extremely didactic message.

Discussion?