October 19, 2009
No Boundaries
When we bought our new church building in May the parking lot was in serious need of attention. Among other defects, you could barely see the parking space lines. One of the first things we did was rent a small machine and tried our hand at striping. I’ll admit that the finished project was obviously the work of a novice, but for a temporary fix it wasn’t too bad. Last week we hired a company to resurface the whole parking lot, but the new striping couldn’t be done until the oil had time to set. So yesterday morning with no delineation we parked on a sea of black. Now you’d think because we’ve all been parking in the same lot for the last six months that we’d have a fairly good idea of where the parking spaces were…wrong. It appeared that the first car to arrive made an educated guess about where to park and then the next incoming car just gauged where to park by the previous car. I’m telling you, angle parking morphing into parallel parking is not a pretty sight. Tell me believers don’t need boundaries, parameters and striping…Biblical and otherwise.
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3 comments:
Gail;
-----We have been debating an interesting topic in Sunday School. One of our class members has offered the possibility that Paul was out of bounds with his treatment of The Law. Everyone in the class came to the defense of the Word, for that is what the Holy Spirit wrote through the hands of Paul and other authors. But we all found Jesus’ statement that not a jot or tittle of The Law would pass away to be an interesting comparison to Paul’s teaching that we were no longer bound to the law. Has the striping been removed from the parking lot, so to speak? Your analogy illustrates well what I think our class received from our discussion. Everyone was still able to park their cars and attend church without the striping, but the disarray made it tacky and difficult. In fact, the true nature of some attendees may have become more obvious without the stripes. Some may have shown good diligence and concern for others by carefully remembering the proper angle against the curb and distance from the car beside them when parking, while others may have shown only a regard for their own comfort by parking any way or where they felt pleased to park. Although it is God’s mercy through Christ’s sacrifice that saves us from doom, it is our willingness to orient ourselves according to His directives that measures the degrees of our genuineness, or even whether we truly do have any new life within us.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Being nearly the last one to church Sunday, I saw a whole parking lot full of messy parking. It's interesting that when one car parked a little crooked, the next one parked crooked beside it, and so on....till the whole row was messed up. Like one straying sheep following another...
Yet what would happen if, within that crooked row, someone decided to park correctly? It would be that one car that would look out of place and messed up, more than all the others who were lined up side by side. And in the church, when someone calls attention - by taking another path - to an area where the sheep have been all straying together, it's that one sheep that looks in the wrong. Maybe we should look more at the parking lot than the cars...at the path than the sheep.
Arlene
Arlene,
Good observation. OK, I’ve got to confess. I didn’t want to be part of the mess, or be a car that looked out of place…so I just parked in the south forty.
Gail
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