"Advice............................."

This morning I shared several B.C. comic strips Facebook where Miss Know-It-All is busy, seated at her boulder and answering all those who have written her for enlightenment. One fellow refers to his doctor having recommending that he play 36 holes a day, admits he hates golf, and asks her “What should I do?” Her response? “Buy a harmonica!” In relating that to a need for believers to embrace a bit of humor in any journey they make where “church” is more than just a pew occupied on Sunday, I compared attachment and commitment to any assembly as living in a “briar patch”, an analogy probably not understood if one has never been introduced to Brer Rabbit in “Song of the South”. Trapped and caught by Brer Bear and Brer Fox, he convinces them to throw him back into entanglement of thorns, the two of them ignorant of the truth: the place is really “home” and a place of safety from what the world elsewhere brings unto him. Thus I have found it to be within the fellowship, over four decades with this bunch having me convinced that “unity” is the same no matter where you sit. It has to flow out of what you hold in your “belly”, not necessarily your head. If the two of us have evolved along the way to a degree of separation finding me nowadays seated in the balcony, it yet remains my heart is rooted in them as well as Him, the Holy Spirit juggling the affair, the “mind of Christ” actually, in as much as this old man has found it to be throughout over forty years in this, is more than just “mentality”. The Greek roots of the word “mind”, as it is used here and there in the Book, give definition to its meaning more than what one might suppose, in one place suggesting “being sound mind and self-controlled as to opinion or passion”, elsewhere as “exercising so as to have sentiment, disposed in a certain direction”, and again as “the intellect in thought, feeling, or will”. So when Paul expresses as possessing that portion of Him, can it be that, rather than our having been permanently “cloned” to be as He is, in truth we are no more than we ever were, “just” reconnected to His reality in a manner that we, like those in the Cartoonist’s rendering, can take our questions, our confusion, our humanity as it exists, unto His oasis? What if, as we go, salvation is not about how perfect we are, how much we “blend” with everybody else in the sanctuary, or how well we have “thumped our theology” unto others? What if it all comes down to a face-to-face conversation with Him maintained on a regular basis? Now there’s a rock with better answers than “Buy a harmonica”………………