I didn’t get to know the single mother and her homeschooled teenage
daughter very well, but we would visit generically back and forth over the
fence. One time I tried the standard Christmas invitation to church, but it was
brushed aside when the mother told me they didn’t celebrate holidays.
With their car loaded and ready to get on the road, we gave our good-bys and well-wishes and then the mother gave me a hug and said, “You’re the best neighbors I’ve ever had.”
I don’t think that I really deserve the compliment, or that I adequately applied the second greatest commandment. Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’.” (Matt 22:37-39 NIV)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Each human being is a different context. When two cross paths they are reading the same sentence. One sentence can contain many meanings. “David struck it well,“ could mean he got rich if he were in Las Vegas, or it could mean Goliath is dead if he were on the battlefield. Inside, people can differ that much. So, each extracts a meaning from one common experience according to his own context, and the more casual and less focused are the conversations and interactions between the two, the more potential is there for disparities of meaning.
-----This is why I say that a simple smile can preach the entire gospel without the smiler even knowing. You never know what thoughts and reflections are happening in the deeper parts of another’s soul; usually you don’t know what primer for change or influence might be assembled there at any given moment. But the more you smile and simply treat others right, the more opportunities you make for them to strike it well (or strike you well, remember Ted Bundy.)
-----Beware, though. We live in a particularly evil age. For sure we’ve had our pockets crammed full all of our days in this country. That is not necessarily evil. It can be greatly righteous if thanksgiving to the Lord flowed as freely amongst us as the pockets are crammed tight. Although thanksgiving is a generality particularized by each different person, it is still thanksgiving. And it is only one of many, many attitudes which make up the new life in us which will never die. Although we each greatly differ in the particular contexts which we are, we all still speak English, another more general part of context. So, although much meaning of a common event gets particularized differently between people, much is also taken the same. For Nicolaitans, the commonality of people can present a problem.
-----Who are Nicolaitans? I like to take the word straight for what it says, nico: from Greek for “conquer”; laitans: from Greek for people. They are people conquerors. Like heflumps and woozles, they come in many shapes and sizes, and they do what they choozles. In fact, they want you doing what they choozles, too. That’s how they are people conquerors. For them to crush a great and godly land like what America was into intolerable, atheistic lemmings, they must ruin its general unity around the God and godliness it once knew. This is the goal of the deconstructionism they began teaching in colleges and universities in the late sixties. Now that they have succeeded in destroying the common meanings of the lost American culture, there is every kind of different group of people imaginable ranting and raving and begging and demanding everything imaginable. We are crushed into sifting sand. The celebration of diversity is about the destruction of any remaining commonality people might regard about truth and reality. Now, America, freedom and liberty, truth and love, and even Jesus and eternal life can and do mean just about anything to anybody. Without commonality, there is no longer any cohesiveness around which we can form resistance; “Resistance is futile.“ We are nearly conquered.
-----Sorry to end so blue. Go smile; Jesus has a glorious, bursting-forth purpose which will punctuate this nearing, pitiful end.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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