Today's Scripture Reading (December 27, 2023): Luke 8
I graduated
from High School in a small rural town. Now, I am a city kid, so when my family
moved to a rural community before the start of my junior year in High School,
it was a bit of a culture shock. I didn't know much about rural life. One of
the things that was new to me was the annual May Day competition. The May Day
competition was held in the spring of the year, around the first weekend in May.
Each grade class nominated a May Day Princess, and then we, her subjects, went
to work, quite literally, to raise some much-needed funds for the school. We worked
odd jobs, and the money went toward school upgrades. The result was that the
grade that raised the most money had their princess crowned queen.
So, I went to
work at jobs I had never dreamed I would ever have to do. One of my tasks was
to muck out barns, a very interesting job for a city boy who didn't spend much
time around horses. Another job that I did was picking rocks out of fields. I freely
admit it; I am a city boy, and the city boy inside me thought that if you
picked stones out of an area once, you wouldn't have to do it ever again. So,
when they told me that rocks needed to be picked out of a field regularly, I
didn't get it. I mean, who was throwing rocks into these farmers' fields? I
want to know.
But the
reality is that fields grow rocks. I didn't know that. Picking rocks was often
part of the yearly preparation of the field. Every year, the field has to be
turned, weeds and bugs must be dealt with, and rocks have to be picked. It is
just standard procedure.
I am part of
a church that serves an extravagant God. And he has called me to work in the
field. Sometimes, an extravagant God spreads seeds that hit the rocky ground or
ground surrounded by weeds. But the condition of the field just might be part
of my responsibility. This is the heart of the mission. Under the direction and
power of our God, we are the preparers of the mission field.
Missionaries
learned long ago that preaching the Gospel in the Majority World Areas
(formerly Third World) was useless because the field had to be cultivated,
weeds had to be pulled, and rocks removed. And so, Christians started to
minister to the physical needs of the people. We began to send Doctors and
Nurses, Builders and Teachers. We made our way into their lives and made their
lives better. And then we found that we would have the opportunity to tell them
about Jesus.
A man sat
with some friends long ago and dreamed a dream. He wondered out loud what it
would be like if they could bring some of the Characters he had developed to
life. His name was Walt Disney, and the characters he wanted to bring to life were
Mickey Mouse and his friends. What if they could build a park where the
characters walked around right with the people? What if they could get someone
from Montana or Canada to spend their holidays driving to this park and staying
there for two or three days? What would that be like? Then, the question that
Walt asked his friends to consider was this: When they get home from their trip
and they get their pictures back from the drug store (because back in the day,
that was how it was done), what do we want the images to be of that they place
into their photo Album. Then, Walt and his friends built the dream of
Disneyland around that outcome.
God is asking
us a similar question: We have been called to cultivate the ground and help God
take the pictures of life. But the question we wrestle with is what those
pictures should reflect about life. I would argue that most of the images we
see flash across our screens do not reflect the world God wants to see. It is
up to us to cultivate the field by loving our neighbors and then wait for an
extravagant God to spread the seed.
Tomorrow's Scripture
Reading: Mark 5
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