Marilyn..her address was riveting , suffused with strength and humility…she spoke of her privileged, well heeled, family upbringing in which she was exposed to and experienced the best of everything including the best education in the country…she loved the ‘elegant life’ (food and music etc.) but has since come to see that the ‘true elegance’ is an ‘inner elegance’. She was told by the Lord to leave the best and brightest students and go to the poorest of the poor and then told to sell all she had and give it to the poor. She confessed how hard it was to endure the smells of the poor given her former genteel life. She was being breathed upon by the Holy Spirit to do this and began to immerse herself in scripture…she made the commitment to read the entire Bible every year which she has done for 25 years. She spoke of the true love which doesn’t give out of one’s extras but gives until there is pain..this kind of love washes the life, turns sinners into saints, heals the unwell, strengthens the weak and effects true forgiveness. I described her in my notes as a person filled with ‘affective Christocentricity’.(I found this picture of her.)
She concluded by saying that whenever she goes to another country she bows down, kisses the earth and blesses the country. She asked to bless the church in a similar fashion ..so she bowed down and kissed the floor and blessed the church..her lithely done prostrations were the same as those used by the Muslims in their prayers. Her organization is named after the martyr Stephen and is the largest ministry in Africa serving 27,000 families a day. She is surely living a ‘white martyrdom’.
Isn't the phrase, 'inner elegance' compelling?
And then I drove to work listening to a sermon aired on a local radio station. The pastor is the leader of a large church in Lexington. He spoke from the passage which tells the story of Peter walking on water in response to Jesus invitation, when Jesus came walking toward the disciple's boat in the middle of the night. He makes the point that we need to step out of the boat, using his own life as the example. His story, which is the story of being invited by God to take risks that inevitably led to establishing this church, has put him into the place of leading a large non-traditional church.
It may be that you or I feel drawn to one or the other of these stories. We might make judgments.
I ponder this as I walk into my office this morning, realizing again that each of us must listen to our own life, our own heart, and the whispers of divine calling within our own spirit, and neither envy another person nor demand that anyone else live as we have felt led to. The example may be inspiring but the details are unique. Each of us must own and love our own life.
2 comments:
Loved this -- especially her definition of true love: "She spoke of the true love which doesn’t give out of one’s extras but gives until there is pain..this kind of love washes the life, turns sinners into saints, heals the unwell, strengthens the weak and effects true forgiveness."
Whoa. I could mull this around for few weeks!
Thanks for sharing.
The same phrase that got to Laurie J. is the one that impacted me. "True love which doesn't give out of one's extras but gives until there is pain." In a nutshell, I suspect that has a lot to do with the problems in the North American church and why our young people are leaving their faith in droves. We don't get it at all. We have so much. We don't have just money, either, although compared to the rest of the world, even the poor here have a lot of money. We have health care, transportation, room in our homes, freezers full of food, many changes of clothes, leisure activities that we treat as sacred...I could go on. I give a lot - all the time - yet I rarely give until it hurts. Always, my needs are taken care of, tithing is budgeted for, and if somebody expects more from me than I want to give, I'm irritated.
Our family has decided that in September we will give a significant portion of our grocery budget to Somalia and choose to eat simple meals instead. The truth is, we could find that money somewhere else in our budget, and even though I'm hoping we'll be reminded of how lucky we are, we'll still eat far better than much of the world. In other words, it's really not going to hurt, because we have lots of extra.
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