Walk around
"More and more the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be a part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes and hugs that you do not simply like them, but you truly love them."
--Henri Nouwen
Labels: pearls
posted by caparoon @ 6:14 AM
4 Comments:
Observations:
- Many people are turning to cyber social networks to fulfill the gap of the missing street-walkers. These take place in the medium of cell phones, blackberries, PDAs and computers in the form of blogs, IM, Text Messaging, and email. Do people still use IRC?
- "love", or the cheap reflection of it, is no longer communicated by actively listening (in a giving sense), but rather by the expectation that people will tell you how great you are or something you said or have done (in a taking sense).
- none of the above is really that satisfying
Yes. There is nothing so tragic as missing street-walkers. I know, because I watch a lot of TV cop shows, and they're all the time on about the missing street-walkers.
Wait. Maybe that's not what you meant...
I like the fact, actually, that there are a lot of online communities. It doesn't solve the issue of lack of true community, but I think that, overall, it whets the collective appetite for the real thing.
Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy the online communities. I am involved in a couple (although mostly technical in nature).
I wonder, very seriously, what it would be like to live in the era when people got together to go bowling, play card games, get the latest gossip at the barbershop and do a lot of line dancing.
What would it be like to be a farmer, and actually engage in hard work for a livelihood? What would it be like to live with accountability to the whole community? What would it be like to have politicians that were honorable and trustworthy?
Then I get to thinking, what kind of impact is the Christian community making on the general community? Sometimes it seems like we merely take a short break from watching our Monday night football to comment on how "inappropriate" those Go Daddy commercials are. Has the salt lost its saltiness?
PS - as my wife will attest, we abhor watching sports. But we waste enough time doing other things that it is really irrelevant.
I know some people are actually starting to alter their priorities radically enough that they are trying to move, geographically, to be in the same neighborhoods as one another.
And I had a conversation yesterday about how in other cultures, people are baffled by the idea that moving somewhere because your friends or family are there wouldn't be the default tendency. Whereas, in our culture, moving next door to friends or family is largely considered silly. I mean.. what if you don't end up *liking* those people?
The idea that we would simply "do life" together has become, quite literally, a foreign concept.
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