Godgrown

Updates from April, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Mark 7:22 am on April 12, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, Lent ( 3 )   

  Whose Side I’m Fighting For 

  It is hard to say or to know what exactly matters in my line of work.  The lines get so blurry.  I wish sometimes I could lay my head on the pillow at the end of the day and have a sense of knowing for sure that the Kingdom made its way, even just one more inch, into the city of Chicago through something I did, something I participated in.  But it doesn’t work like that.

  More often than not, it is messy dance of back and forth.  It is ambiguous victories mixed with incomplete failures.  I don’t know half the time whose side I’m fighting for – and often it feels like my efforts are doing more harm for the Kingdom than good.

  Why all this self-doubt?  We’re getting toward the end of Lent, and I realize each year that no matter how much purging and confession and buffeting I do to hone myself closer to the Living God, there is simply no way to transcend the fact that I’m a person who will also be mixed with the spiritual warfare going on all around us. At times I pick up the flag of the enemy and run in the opposite direction, hell bent on destroying everything I desperately want to see accomplished in God’s work here in Chicago.

  Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement once said:

  “What we do is very little.  But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes.  Christ took that little and increased it.  He will do the rest.  What we do is so little that we may seem to be constantly failing.  But so did he fail.  He met with apparent failure on the Cross.  But unless the seeds fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.”

  Being a missionary isn’t a neat and tidy job, but then again, Jesus had a fine time living in ambiguity and failure.  That brings me peace.

  

  Mark W, and Travis Akins are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Travis Akins 1:45 pm on April 12, 2011 Permalink

    Mark-thanks for sharing honestly and openly. HUGE encouragement. I have the same worries/struggles in my ministry. Thanks for the re-focus.

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    Mark W 4:36 pm on April 12, 2011 Permalink

    It always helps to remember that all our “castles” we build in life are SANDcastles – and every so often its sort of refreshing to kick a few over!

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  Mark 12:23 pm on March 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Kavanah 

  In Judaism, there is a distinct activity called kavanah. It is cultivated in order to maximize the inwardness of our actions. It means to pay attention, to direct the mind and heart in order to maximize the levels of intentionality in our actions. This applies to actions/deeds as it does to the Study of Scripture and to prayer but goes beyond these activities themselves to the notion of attentiveness to God Himself. It is not primarily an awareness of being commanded by God, but an awareness of the God who commands.

  At its core it is built on the Hebraic understanding that there are effectively only two realities in the world: the holy and the not-yet-holy, and that the missional task of God’s people is to make the not-yet-holy into that which is holy. This is done by the directing of the deed toward God (and not away from Him) and by the level of intentionality and holiness with which we perform our daily tasks. It is important to note that any and every deed, no matter how seemingly profane or trivial, can become a place of holiness when performed with the right intention and with the appropriate holy direction.

  — Alan Hirsch

  
   
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  Mark 10:33 am on February 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Seed Travelers 

  A favorite pastime: climbing a maple tree as high up as I could go, picking off a pair of helicopter seeds (also called whirly-gigs!) and let them loose.  They’d spin and glide to my heart’s delight.  Ah…the simple pleasures in life.

  It was amazing how far a helicopter seed could travel!  And they were designed for travel.

  So are you.

  If you follow Christ – you’re a traveler. You can’t say you follow Jesus and sit on your hands.  You have a seed and a wing – and you’ve been let loose!  The Spirit will blow you in places you could never imagine – and its up to you to simply do nothing…just be you. Let the DNA of Jesus do its work in the soil you land in – and in a couple of years, you won’t be able to recognize yourself – only God will get the glory!

  If you look carefully at these seeds – most of them are in pairs.  Go out with your “pair” (MICRO) in mission.  You might be able to preach the gospel with your words, but it is impossible to SHOW the gospel without a community.