lent 2023 day 18

 How annoying is it when you are scrolling through your Facebook timeline and see something you want to use as an illustration for your Lent blog then cant find it again - despite much searching ?  

The post was an advert for some sort of travel company doing Celtic tours of Ireland.  And the picture accompanying the advert was of a signpost .  The sort of signpost you find on costal paths or heritage trails.  There were two markers on the post - one was pointing to the Heritage Centre and the other to the Tourist Information Centre.   I briefly registered the image and carried on scrolling.  And then it sort of focused in my mind as something that God wanted to talk about.  So I went back to look for it and it had disappeared!!  Grrrrr.  Perhaps by the time Ive finished writing this it will pop up again.  In the meantime you will have to use your imaginations.

The thought that occurred to me was that we have a choice as Christians.  Are we going to be tourists or researchers?  On the surface it might seem that being tourists is a bad thing - but Im not sure it is.  When we are tourists we purposely go somewhere we haven't been before and we appreciate all the things that the locals take for granted.  We might choose to immerse ourselves in a new culture.  Visit places of outstanding beauty. Stop and smell the roses.  Being a tourist isn't a bad thing.  Sometimes going somewhere as a tourist leads us to make permanent choices to relocate.    Spiritually I think sometimes it is good for us to get out of our comfort zones and go exploring.  Maybe we can go and visit a church which is way outside our own tradition and go with an open heart ready to drink in all that we can.  Not long ago I was in a Catholic cathedral.  Not somewhere I find myself very often.  There were the most stunning paintings on the walls depicting the stations of the cross.  I stood open mouthed at the beauty and the skill and the devotion displayed.  And felt a little bit sad that we Protestants don't really do church art in the way that the Catholics do.  The older I get the more I feel that I want to be more tolerant of other ways of doing things.  I realise that my own understanding of God's stuff is so infinitesimally small.  He has a whole world of expression and experience and understanding out there and I've only seen a fraction of it.

The other signpost was to the Heritage Centre - which to me spoke of going deeper.  Knowing more. Appreciating the history and facts of one place over time.  Its a more stationary thing than tourism.  Heritage doesn't travel, it stays.  But it stays in order to understand.  Spiritually we can always dig deeper. We have an amazing heritage not only through Jesus but also in the church tradition to which we belong.   Most of you reading will have probably come from the same church background as me ( wildly charismatic) and are now in something completely and utterly different.  If you had told me 30 years ago that I'd be up to my neck in a Church of Ireland church plant I'd have laughed.  ( especially if you'd told me that my main contribution would be with under 3 yr olds!)  But the truth is I wouldn't be here now were it not for the amazing teaching and worship and deep fellowship of back then.  God planted so much, so deeply within me.  I am amazed and grateful.  As Im sure are you for your heritage.  

Perhaps what God is saying today is that He doesn't want us to choose either/or.  The signpost suggests we have to go to one place or the other.  But maybe we need both.  We need to dig deeper into our heritage, into God's story in our own lives and in the life of the church and then take all that information and knowledge with us as we travel.  When we know who we are we can go confidently, and wherever we go will will be salt and light and life.  And I don't think we need to worry if we are travelling through and don't seem to settle anywhere for very long.  Our roots are in our heritage not in a place or a congregation.  But maybe when we come home again we can enrich the homeplace with the things we have learned on our travels.

Does any of that make any sense at all???  😀

Found it !!!



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