Byrnesys Blabberings

Today I lived ot this statement, I was at what felt likean absolute dead end today at work. I was trying to sort out some planning and couldn’t ge what felt like a very sqaure peg into around whole. I asked whethera couple of my coleagues would sit dow withme and give me their take on it, by the end of that, all but one of my original problems were solved!

So often I find myself annoyed at people though, thinking "Why cant they just think like me", or in my arrogance, "I wish they would see i my wayan we could get on with it". In church so much of our conflict is based essentially around concepts, and preferences, these preferences are how "we like thing done", they cater to our theology, our culture, our age-group, our tastes, and often we think that our preferences should dictate how things are done in our communities of faith.

When things aren’t done the way we like them, we go somewhere else, or we tell other people to go somewhere else, we say to the people that don’t fit in, "you don’t belong here", if we don’t say that with our mouths we say it with our actions and attitudes. Stanley Hauerwas said "A society is a group united by it’s loves", the Church can be in danger of loving its preferences more than it loves Jesus and the things he stood for, when we follow Jesus we are called to pick up a cross, and that cross crucifies our preferences, it crucifies "the way we’ve alway done it" and it crucifies needing to always do "a new thing", it crucifies this so that we can love our neighbours our ourselves, we can put aside our preferences and put on Christ, who sought to love the world.

Writing all this reminds me of the guy in the temple who said, "This is hard teaching…who can fulfill it",I feel like that guy when I think about all of this.