disruptive grace

I had always intended for this to be a place to plan and report on activities of service, love and generally making a positive contribution to the world. So here is a little clipping from the local newsletter. A group of us went down to help plant some flowers and trees at a local water meadow area. It was a great way in my mind to ‘practice resurrection’ (as Wendall Berry put it); by being involved in nurturing nature, making the community livable again, and working along side our neighbours.

Helping at the Water Meadow

You can see my wife and kids if you squint, plus a nice shot of my rear end too!

When ever I have conversations about living for the benefit of others, often myself or my conversation partner will say, ‘but I’m not sure what to actually do’. One answer to this is to learn to be aware of your surroundings, the people and goings on around you. And it is important to be prayerfully present in our communities.

On a very practical level there are other tools and means to augment this. Fix my street is a website created to bug the city council to sort out local problems – but it could be used to find the areas of need around you – places where you can serve.

These are the closest 7 reported problems near my house:
• Persistent dog fouling from owned dogs. (0.4km)
• Dog mess..offensive and dangerous (1.1km)
• Blocked gulley (1.3km)
• Graffiti on utility box (1.4km)
• Graffiti on utility box (1.4km)
• Rubbish in street (1.4km)
• Vandalised utility box (1.4km) (fixed)

I want to continue the thought explored in the last post on ‘Mission and Pain’. There’s a few directions I’d like to explore, so I’m going to have to come back to some of these, including: some of Tom Wright’s stuff exploring this issues, on following in the way of Jesus, and on the role artist; also the aspects of Bruggeman’s talk on the prophetic imagination in regards to grief and hope.

However, now I want to think about lived examples. I love hearing real stories of real people, and I believe these stories free us to imagine how our lives could be. Recently I’ve become aware of a number of local friends who are ‘being’ in places of pain, I’ll use pseudonyms so not to not cause embarrassment. The following is a brief description of three of these.

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[note: I keep finding myself editing this and making adjustments]

This is a space for those of us who have been captivated by Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God. We want to see this good news lived out in our every day lives.

We believe in God who is restoring the world with his radical embracing grace. This God of grace disrupts our everyday lives and inivtes us to live with the conviction the Jesus is Lord and the systems of this world are not.

This embracing grace is changing our whole lives, reconnecting us to God, to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Restoring us to who we were created to be.

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