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Sometimes several different threads come together and if you give them a little tug they become macrame. All the different things I read this morning were like that, the devotion for today from “Inward Work for Outward Living”, Teri Mcdowell Ott for The Presbyterian Outlook was about the fear of loss; the Sunday School lesson for this week, Serving the Stranger; and last week, Loving Extravagantly by Loving Your Enemy.
The question from the devotional was essentially what do we fear losing and why, particularly when we are reminded repeatedly and in many different ways to not worry, that God will provide? Here in the heart of Montgomery County, many of us are truly blessed to have little concern about genuine want – we will quite probably never know true hunger; we will probably never be homeless; we will probably always have clothes appropriate to the weather and be able to work and/or attend a good school. But still we worry.
Another question that has been on my mind since last week was, who is my enemy? Though I KNOW there are horrible situations in which family members and other people who appear to be friends turn out to be enemies, generally enemies are people we don’t know very well, if at all – they are strangers.
So, without belaboring the idea, if we took the time to get to know our “enemies”, if they stopped being strangers, perhaps we would realize that we have more in common than we thought, that those people don’t want to take our stuff or to curtail our freedoms, they just don’t want us to do it to them. We might even come to discover that we are indeed stronger and better together than we ever could have been apart, and particularly stronger than when we spent time being frightened of each other.
I’m going to share two video links with you. One is to a read aloud of Stone Soup, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Avo5FJ250, a story about a village full of frightened, selfish people who come together. And the other, bit.ly/FMAirportMeal, a fascinating experiment at an airport.
If you’d like me to send you a copy of Outward Work for Inward Living just let me know.
-Carolyn Hayes
Director of Children and Young Families
