What is a Mission Statement?

A recent post on a Christian women-in-business facebook page asked members to share their mission statement. I’ve considered this before in various organizations and also thought about what I want to achieve in my business, but I have never written a formal mission statement for myself. 

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary has not one but six possible meanings for the word mission. It could be “a particular task or goal assigned to a person or group, a journey with purpose,” or even a person’s work or vocation. Other meanings included “military or scientific expedition for a particular outcome,” such as any of the relief operations that help people in need. Such a declaration might also be called a statement of belief.

Mission statements are often posted on an organization’s website, and a church’s mission statement will be different than that of a corporate company that provides services or works for public good. 

While a mission is still an activity sponsored by a church in a Third World country or closer to home, it’s often an act to alleviate some challenge in the life of people  in that community, such as feeding the hungry or a social justice movement.

The Food Bank of Waterloo Region, for example, calls its statement an ethical code. It reads: “Food Banks Canada, its members … believe that everyone in Canada has the right to physical and economic access, at all times, to sufficient, safe, nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences.” This statement, along with the organization's action plan, helps the Food Bank focus on the purpose and help those who come for assistance.

The Word Guild—the Canadian association that hosts this blog—has a vision and a mission statement. Their vision: To positively influence individuals—and ultimately the Canadian culture—through life-changing words that bring God`s message of hope.  

To accomplish this vision, their mission statement is to strengthen the "Canadian Christian writing and publishing community" and to encourage "excellence in writing" so that it might impact "Canadian culture through the words of writers, editors and speakers with a Christian worldview." To that end, the organization offers learning opportunities so that writers have the tools to make that happen.

I could list other organizational missions, but I`d like to focus on individual missions. Mother Teresa, in her lifetime, began a mission to be attentive to the poor and dying in Calcutta, India, but she couldn't do it alone. She gathered others from her order to help make it happen, and she did it quite successfully, inspiring people around the world with her example.

Going back to the women in business forum, I can now answer the question with greater clarity. The statement could be short and concise, as befits an editor, or a slightly longer one. It's about my underlying beliefs and how I go about my work as an editor, instructor, writer and speaker.  

Somewhat similar to the beam of a lighthouse that helps sailors past treacherous shoals, such a statement guides  me as I work with others and helps me stay focused. Thus part of my guiding principles would be to help the writer be the best that he or she can be.

What is your mission statement?

Carolyn Wilker, editor, writing instructor and speaker

Author of Once Upon a Sandbox

www.carolynwilker.ca 

  

Search for the Historical Victor Hugo - ED HIRD

By Rev Ed Hird

With the recent success of the movie Les Miserables, people have been looking again at the author Victor Hugo.  What is it about Hugo that enabled him to write what Leo Tolstoy called the greatest of all novels? Who was the real historical Victor Hugo?  Every day around 3,000 words are published about Victor Hugo.  It has been said that to read the complete works of Hugo would take no less than ten years.  Every important poet, novelist and dramatist of his age was shaped by Hugo’s prolific endeavours.   Some call him the greatest of French poets.  He was the dominant figure in 19^th century French literature.  By the time he left France in 1851, Hugo was seen as the most famous living writer in the world.  Upon his return to France, thousands of people in Paris chanted ‘Vive Victor Hugo’, reciting his poetry, and throwing flowers on him.  On his eightieth birthday, six hundred thousand Parisians marched past his house in his honor.  At his death, a day of national mourning was declared.

By the time Hugo died in 1883, he had become a symbol of France with all its struggles and challenges.  Hugo lived through bloody uprising after uprising.  Almost a million Frenchmen had died during this revolutionary period, half of them under the age of twenty-eight.  Les Miserables with its passionate message about the barricades reflect this deep trauma of chaos upon unending chaos.
When Hugo was born, his parents were horrified by his appearance.  His own mother could not bear to look at him. His own doctor indicated that without a miracle, Victor would not last out the month.  With an enormous head and a tiny body, his father said that Victor looked like the gargoyles of Notre Dame.  Such an insensitive comment led to his second most favorite novelThe Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Ironically after the success of his Hunchback novel, all the nouveau riche wanted their homes to be ornamented with gargoyles.
Victor adored his mother Sophie but she cared little for her children.  During his childhood, Victor deeply resented his father Leopold who was always away at war.  As an adult, Victor became his father’s closest companion.  His own parents had divided loyalties between the royalists and the republicans.  Hugo’s parents met in Brittany while his Napoleonic father was stamping out a local royalist rebellion.  Both of his parents were unfaithful to their marriage vows, something that repeated itself in Victor’s own marriage.

While only fifteen, Victor applied for the French Academy’s annual poetry contest.  His poetry was so advanced that the Academy refused to accept him until his mother produced his birth certificate. Victor loved to write, commenting that ‘every thought that has ever crossed my mind sooner or later finds it onto paper. …Ideas are my sinews and substance.’

His father Leopold saw Victor’s involvement in literature as being like ‘pouring good wine down an open sewer’.  So he refused to help fund his literary education: “If you were to elect a career as a lawyer or physician, I would gladly make sacrifices to see through university.”  Victor often went without food in his early literary years, saying ‘I shall prove to my father that a poet can make sums far larger than the wages of an Imperial General.’  With great talent and a strong work ethic, Victor became one of a very small band who could earn their living with their pens.  One of Victor’s closest friends was Alexandre Dumas, the famous author of theCount of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers.

One of Victor’s greatest sorrows was that his wife Adele was indifferent to his writings.  Even his passionate love poems for his wife, she ignored.  Adele warned Victor that ‘it is the fault of passionate men to set the women they love upon a pedestal. To be placed so high produces dizziness, and dizziness leads to a fall.’  Adele’s affair with her husband’s best friend Saint-Beauve crushed Victor, leading him into his own ongoing infidelity. There was great tragedy in Hugo’s life with his own brother Eugene having a mental breakdown at Victor’s wedding and his youngest daughter suffering the same fate after being abandoned by her lover Pinson.  One of the deepest wounds was the drowning of Victor’s daughter Leopoldine shortly after her marriage.   Out of this great sorrow came great dramatic writing, especially in his novel Les Miserables.  Andre Maurois commented that Hugo possessed and would retain all his life long, one precious gift: the power to give to the events of everyday life a dramatic intensity.
Ground-zero in Les Miserables was the gracious Bishop Bienvenue who transformed Jean Valjean by his generous act of forgiveness.  Victor Hugo’s son Charles was upset by his father’s choosing of Bishop Bienvenue.  Charles suggested instead that his father should have made Bienvenue to be a medical doctor instead of a clergyman.  Victor replied to his son: ‘Man needs religion. Man needs God. I say it out loud, I pray every night…”  Victor held that humanity is an ‘unspeakable miracle.’   Of all the French Romantics, Hugo made the most explicit usage of the Bible.

I thank God for the life and work of Victor Hugo who had such a passion for life, freedom and forgiveness, especially as seen in his novel Les Miserables.
The Rev Ed Hird, Rector
St. Simon’s North Vancouver
Anglican Mission in the Americas (Canada)
http://stsimonschurch.ca

-previously published in the March 2013 Deep Cove Crier

award-winning author of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’

http://www.battleforthesoulofcanada.blogspot.com

p.s. In order to obtain a copy of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’, please send a $18.50 cheque to ‘Ed Hird’, #1008-555 West 28th Street, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2J7. For mailing the book to the USA, please send $20.00 USD. This can also be done by PAYPAL using the e-mailed_hird@telus.net . Be sure to list your mailing address. The Battle for the Soul of Canada e-book can be obtained for $9.99 CDN/USD.

-Click to download a complimentary PDF copy of the Battle for the Soul study guide : Seeking God’s Solution for a Spirit-Filled Canada

You can also download the complimentary Leader’s Guide PDF: Battle for the Soul Leaders Guide

Mainstream media collapse gathers speed—and why that matters to you - Denyse O'Leary

Recently, analyst Victor Davis Hanson observed that, not only is our world changing radically but it is changing radically very quickly.

 Nowhere is this more true than in the world of mainstream print media, where legacy organizations are collapsing much more quickly than many of us would have expected, raising the question of—what’s a writer to do? How can a writer make a living?

Especially, how can a student with real writing talent, who aspires to be a non-fiction writer, fulfil the dream? It’s possible, but it requires clear and creative thinking.

 First, many who rail against the media get the cause of their problems all wrong: That is, we hear that the media are too left-wing or too right-wing or too shallow or too whatever. Nope.

Well, maybe true, depending on your perspective, but irrelevant.

Historically, media marketed information as well as opinion, and the Internet has now made most information free. As a result, advertisers, who were always the major financial support of most media, are dropping in numbers and willingness to pay, and subscribers are simply going online to find information—including the information from advertisers.

 Even oldsters like me are onto this now: If I would like to buy an oil-filled space heater from the local hardware chain, why should I scan the papers, hoping to find it in one of their ads when I can just go to their site and search on “space heaters”?

 When I started working on this post, I had one example of mainstream media decline, and then suddenly, two, then three, then four. But first, from Hanson:

Always Trying To Find A Better Way To Write…

In two days I will begin an online course to teach me how to use Scrivener, the organizational writing tool for all kinds of writers, but especially novelists. (I believe the creator of the program was a novelist). I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge in November and one of the sponsors was Scrivener. All NaNoWriMo winners could purchase Scrivener half price. I’d heard a lot about this program and thought, “why not?”

Next, I went through the tutorial and currently am using it to help me work through a major novel revision. Even though I am using only a tenth of the program’s capabilities, I can see the usefulness of it, so I decided that maybe some further study was in order. 

Even though I have 18 published novels and many more short stories, I am never quite sure that I am writing the best way that I can. Like many novelists, every time I sit down to write a new novel, I forget how to do it - I forget what I did the previous time. Which is why I’m always on the lookout for new ways to do things, new ways to organize my thoughts, get my clues for my mystery in the right order, and describe my characters. 

So, why am I bringing this up? I guess because as writers we should never feel that we have ‘made it’, that there is nothing else for us to learn. Also, we writers “of a certain age” are never too old to take courses, classes, or try a different way to get our thoughts down. 

Linda Hall

A Most Extravagant Valentine from a Most Extravagant Lover—den Boer

Over the years my husband has been know to treat me to significant valentine surprises...a mushy card, Belgian chocolate, flowers (roses sometimes, even though they cost three times as much on February 14) candlelight dinner, an evening at the theatre.

He tells me I'm worth it.

I believe him.

With a husband like that, I don't know why I would look elsewhere for love, but I have.

I was talking to my lover the other day and asked him to write me a love letter. He said he already had, a whole book of them. He also reminded me of his many gifts including flowers, and his most extravagant gift of all.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." 

Jesus, I love you.

Marian den Boer is the author of Blooming, This Pilgrim's Progress. You can follow her current novel, Minnie Goes to Heaven on her blog. 

What makes a long marriage work?- Gibson

Not everyone will marry. Not everyone wants to—and not everyone should. But long marriages fascinate us all. “How’d they do that?” we wonder, especially around Valentine’s Day.

“What’s the secret of your long romance?” someone asked a happy pair celebrating their golden anniversary.

“Since we both retired, we take warm and wonderful vacations,” the husband answered. “Two months. Every year.”

His wife nodded. “He goes to Barbados in January and February, and I go to Aruba in March and April.”

Or so goes the story.

Not many Canadian marriages last a half-century anymore. And in future years we’ll have no official national stats to tell us just how few. Statistics Canada stopped tracking marriage and divorce statistics after the 2008 census. The agency claims that the increasingly blurry lines of human relationships are making marriage too difficult to track.

Soon we’ll soon have no numbers to grieve. Nothing to remind us how poorly we Canadians are doing in the marriage department. Nothing, that is, but the undeniable and heartbreaking fallout in our families, streets, and communities, for as marriage goes—so goes the family.

Based on past figures alone, Statistics Canada predicts that 43.1% of Canadian marriages will end in divorce before their fiftieth year. Second marriages are even less likely to last—they have lower than half the success rate of first marriages. And couples marrying for the third time may as well say, “I do-omed,” instead of “I do.” Sadly, the stats for people of faith are equally miserable.

Happily, some couples DO reach that golden milestone. Smiling. And many more determine to do so. But how? I asked that in a column some time ago: “In the factory where souls are partnered, how is it that only a few unions escape built in obsolescence? What makes a marriage into a marathon, and not a hundred yard dash? Is it the road or the runners that guarantee the gold?”

Thirty-seven years ago, my husband and I entered our union on the marathon ticket. Like most other couples, naively reaching for gold. Now, with decades of road—smooth and bumpy—behind us, we have a better idea of the answer to that question—and it doesn’t include separate vacations—at least not regular ones.

So far, we’ve learned, among other things, that keeping a successful marriage is a little like keeping a car running. Only regular maintenance saves it from the junk heap. Like a mechanic’s checklist, a healthy marriage has a daily list of its own:

Today I choose to love in spite of_____. Today I will compromise my personal agenda for my spouse’s. Today I will be faithful. Today I will forgive. Today I will settle for ‘good enough.’ Today, I will remember that I’m no bargain either.

Here’s what else I’ve found: When we’re willing to let him, God keeps pouring love back into a marriage that’s running on empty. And with that, we intend to win gold.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Kathleen Gibson ponders faith and life in her newspaper column, Sunny Side Up, and on her radio spots, Simple Words, aired weekdays on numerous Christian stations around the world. Find her online at www.kathleengibson.ca

The Truth of God's Love - M. Laycock

“Did you call her?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Mom!” My daughter sounded exasperated.

“I don’t want her to think I’m a hovering, over-protective mother.” I tried to defend my reasons for not calling our youngest daughter who had just moved away from home and begun a new career. I’d been anxiously awaiting a phone call from her telling us how it was going, but had heard nothing.

“But she won’t think that,” my older and wiser daughter insisted. “We all love you and we want you to call. If you don’t we think you don’t love us, that you don’t care.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I called her that night. She had sent me three text messages that hadn’t gotten through and was very happy to hear from me. Things were indeed going well and she was happy to tell me all about it.

This incident made me think about my lack of communication with God. Sometimes I don't pray because I think my requests are too insignificant compared to the needs of others. Sometimes I hold back because I doubt that He has time for me. And sometimes I'm afraid He might even reject me. After all, I'm a frail and failing human. I know I disappoint Him continually. How could he possibly love me?

These are the lies the evil one whispers. I am prone to believe them. But then I read His word, His love letter to me, and the truth draws me back.

"Consider the ravens: they do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!" (Luke 12:24).

"Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands" (Deuteronomy 7:9).

"Praise to the Lord, for he showed his wonderful love to me... (Psalm 31:21).

"Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies" (Psalm 36:5).

"The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. (Deuteronomy 31:8).

Over and over again the scripture tells us that God loves us, not because of what we have done, or how holy we are, or how beautiful or how wise, but because we are His children. He is pictured as a bird that gathers her chicks under its wing, and as a mighty God who sends his angels to stand guard over us.

And, as all parents who love their children know, He wants us to come to Him with our heart's cry, to pour out the pain we feel and the joy. He wants to be part of our lives, to help and to guide. He loves us. Even when we fail, even when we disappoint, even when we turn away from Him. He loves us. Period.

"Whoever is wise, let him heed these things and consider the great love of the Lord" (Psalm 107:43).

 ****

Marcia Laycock writes from central Alberta Canada where she lives with her pastor husband and two golden retrievers. Visit her website to learn more about her writing/speaking ministry.

Trust That This is a River - Carolyn Arends

I recently had the opportunity to interview Wm. Paul Young, the "accidental" author who penned The Shack as a Christmas gift for his family and watched it sell 18 million copies.  I wondered if he might have faced the world's worst case of writer's block when he sat down to intentionally write his next novel, Cross Roads.  His answer--"No, I think writer's block just means there's something else you'd rather be doing"--aggravated me to no end.  (I'm prone to more than my share of blocks.)  When I expressed my incredulity, he offered a perspective on his creative process that I suspect will be instructive and inspiring to all of us who seek to co-create anything (literature, art, music, business solutions, Sunday School lessons, etc) with God.

In the fall of 2007, when The Shack started taking off, I had this night of epiphany—something that’s never happened before or since. At 2 am, I woke up and I was under a waterfall of creative ideas.  After an hour of this, the thought crossed my mind, “I’ve got to get up and write this down.” And it all stopped. 

The Holy Spirit spoke to my heart and said, “Paul this is just like you. You don’t trust that it’s a river. So you want to dam it up and get your little bottles out and get all the water you can and then sell it—for identity and worth and value and significance and security and meaning and purpose. You want to commoditize the river because you don’t trust that it’s going to be there. “

So anytime I write, my first thought is always, “I trust that this is a river.” And if the timing is right, I’ll get swept down-river somewhere.  -- Wm Paul Young

You can read my entire Light Magazine interview with Paul HERE.

Learn more about Paul's new book: Cross Roads

And visit me at CarolynArends.com

Splash in the river today!
Carolyn

Tipping and Tything - Meyer

I was interested to read recently about the waitress who received a snide remark written on the bill instead of a tip. The message read: “I only give God 10%; why should I give you 18%?”

Ah, why indeed. I just bet that fella had never been a waiter. And before passing judgement on the poor woman (which is what he very clearly did), he should have listened to the old adage to first walk a mile in a man’s shoes. If you’ve never been a waitress before, don’t judge that she is unworthy of the 18% tip that the rest of society has judged to be a fair compensation to her.

I was a waitress while my husband was going to school fulltime. We would gather up the tips and use it to buy food to last us until the next day when we would use those tips to buy food for the following day. My wages went to pay for our rent, heat and electricity. Most waitresses don’t have unions, pensions, sick days, benefits, or any of the other job perks that many of us enjoy. A case in point, the waitress in the above news story got fired for telling about the incident.

I read a very good article about this in Christianity Today. One comment the writer made was that we shouldn’t go out to eat if we can’t afford to tip. A very good point! Ditto with getting your hair done or ordering a pizza or ordering room service. If you don’t have the money to pay the tip, you don’t have the money to ask for the service – period.

And whatever happened to generosity? Why are we limiting ourselves to 18%? Do we pull out our calculator and make sure that if our bill is $15.73, we give a tip of $2.36? Or can we be gracious and loving as our Father commanded us to do and leave three dollars or better yet, what used to be a common comment, “Keep the change!” So our total expenditure is $20.00. What has that extra $4.27 cost us in terms of a relationship, a witness for Christ, and just good common decency?

Can we just make it a policy to give 20% (it’s easier to calculate) and round it up to the next dollar? After all, that is how God treats us, richly lavishing blessings on us each and every day until our cup literally overflows!  

Dorene Meyer

www.dorenemeyer.com

Author of newly released Jessie's Secret

It's Okay to Say NO! Even in Church by Rose McCormick Brandon

Many sermons manage in one way or another to relay the subtle (sometimes not so subtle) message that the people in the pew simply aren’t doing enough and anyone who is doing enough isn’t doing it well enough. These types of sermons are designed to make people feel guilty about such things as the amount of money they give, their level of church participation  and how faithful they are to church attendance.
One preacher often used this evil dig: if you love the pastor, you’ll attend church Sunday mornings; if you love the people, you’ll be at the Sunday night service too but if you love the Lord you’ll also be at Wednesday night Bible study.  A few titters came from the congregation but the jab hidden in this comment discourages people. The real message it sends is this: if you're not here every time the doors are open, you'd better feel guilty about it.
Many people arrive at church in need of encouragement. Their hearts long for God’s Word and the kindness and love of fellow believers. They’re already overwhelmed by home and job responsibilities. It's their time to receive something from the pulpit, an anointed sermon and heartfelt prayer. They also need to receive from other members of the congregation - affection, thoughtfulness and again, prayer.
They don’t need a razzamatazz of announcements that will fill their already crowded calendars. Women especially don't want to hear that ten pans of lasagna and 100 dozen cookies are needed for the following week. (Don't stores sell that stuff?) Or that a busload of teens is descending on the church and every one of them will require a billet.  And no one - man, woman or child - ever needs a drawn-out begging fest for money.
I know, I know, somebody has to do the heavy lifting in church. The question each person in the pew needs to answer is – does it need to be me?
After years of exhaustive "service to the Lord" I finally gave myself permission to say NO to many church requests – and it was one of the best things I’ve done for myself. It freed me to think about what Jesus wants me to do with my life - surely there's more to my service for God than filling in my name on endless miles of sign-up sheets.
Paul wrote in I Corinthians 7:23 - "You were bought with price - purchased with a preciousness and paid for (by Christ); then do not yield yourselves up to become (in your own estimation) slaves to men, (but consider yourself slaves to Christ). (Amplified version)
God sees me and you as individuals not as just another church member. We each have a calling from God and gifts we've received to fulfil that calling. Many pew people have greater gifts for soul-winning than pulpit people. But sadly, too many become bogged down in church-sitting and never get on with their own telling-people-about-God ministry.
When the busyness of doing church hinders our calling in Christ; when we feel more discouraged exiting the church than entering, something is wrong. And no one can fix it but us.
The best way to start the fixing process is by saying NO to things that hinder and YES to fulfilling God's call in our lives.
******

Rose McCormick Brandon’s articles and essays are published in magazines, books, newspapers and devotionals in Canada and the U.S. She is an award-winning writer who specializes in personal experience, faith, life stories and the British Home Child Immigration period of Canadian history. Rose is married to Doug, an investment consultant, with whom she also co-authors articles on finances. Visit her blogs: The Promise of Home (http:littleimmigrants.wordpress.com) and Listening to My Hair Grow (http:rosemccormickbrandon.wordpress.com). Contact address: rosembrandon@yahoo.ca. 

Recognizing our Gifts Ruth Smith Meyer

“Why didn’t I start my writing career 30 or 40 years ago,” I often wonder.

When I was only five, my older sister practiced teaching skills on me, her only pupil.  Before I started school, she had taken me through the second grade reader and math book.  One day she gave me a list of topics to choose one on which I was to write an essay.  I had no idea what an essay was.  When I cried, my mother stepped in and told my sister I was too young to do that. 

She just moved her “classroom” upstairs then told me “An essay is just a story, so choose a topic and write about it.”  I felt I had no choice, so I wrote a short story.  I don’t remember how long it was or what I put in it, but there was a sense of elation that accompanied the achievement.   From that time on, the idea of writing stories appealed to me.   Throughout school, English was my favorite topic and I loved the opportunities that gave me to compose stories, letters and descriptive paragraphs. Perhaps today, young people are more often encouraged to explore the possibilities in their strengths, but in a small one-room school such as I attended there wasn’t much career guidance offered.    

To satisfy my urge to put pen to paper, as a teenager I wrote monthly, long epistles to thirty-five pen-pals, I began to write for church newsletters, I wrote poetry and opinion pieces.  I still remember, when I was quite young, finally getting the courage to send a poem to a magazine.  Much to my surprise, it was not only accepted and published—they sent a cheque!  I had thought I might have to pay them to publish it—that’s how naïve I was at the time.  Can you imagine? 

Over the years I wrote articles for weekly newspapers, many letters to the editor in larger city daily papers.  As part of my job, I wrote a weekly column for four weekly newspapers for quite a few years, and still I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I was just doing what I enjoyed doing. I felt lucky to find places to share my writing and didn’t even think of looking for publishers who would pay.

It was after the death of my first husband that Brenda Lundy, one of the organizers of God Uses Ink who went to my son’s church and who had seen some of my writing, suggested to him that I should attend one of their conferences.  The following year, I attended the first WRITE! Canada Conference.   

It was during those three busy, informative and inspiring days that I suddenly recognized that I had indeed started being a writer even more than forty years ago. What I needed to do was recognize it, nurture and develop it. I came home from that conference ready to at least hesitantly call myself a writer.

 Isn’t that the way it is in life?  We don’t always recognize our gifts.  Sometimes we realize we enjoy a certain activity but we don’t think about how that could be developed into a career or service opportunity. It often takes someone else to point it out to us and encourage us to use that gift. Brenda Lundy and The Word Guild did that for me.  

The Word Guild has helped many people do just that.  As members we can each encourage those unrecognized writers around us.  Whether published in small or large circulations, whether writing has been done for a circle of friends or the larger public, whether it’s journals that have been written or full length books, talents can be used to help, encourage, challenge and enlighten others.  Most of all there is joy in allowing God to work through us. Write on!

 

THE HOLINESS OF LOVE--- Alan Reynolds

"In our present era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action” (Dag Hammarskjold).

“What we are all more or less lacking at this moment is a new definition of holiness” (Teilhard de Chardin).

 In the Hebrew, the word for “holy” is qadhosh. It comes from
a root meaning “to cut, to separate.” In Hebrew understanding, and common to human religions, that which is holy is cut off, separated from common usage for sacred purposes.

 In the Christian church we speak of the holy Bible, or the holy sacraments, or holy baptism, and even the holy church. We consecrate a place for worship that is set apart from common use. We divide life into the sacred and the secular, those things that are “holy” and those things that are common. In traditional terms, the road to holiness was found in turning from the world and things of the world, in taking the path of asceticism, of prayer and contemplation. It is perhaps understandable that, amid the corruption of the late Roman Empire, the early church believed that to achieve holiness it was necessary to cut one’s self off from the world, to go to the desert to seek perfection in a life of prayer, or to live with a small group of like-minded people a life of rigorous spiritual discipline.

 This is the way the monastic movement began, and some traditions of the Christian church still divide their priesthood into “the secular” who serve the church in parishes (in the world), and “the religious” or “the perfect” who withdraw from the world to a life of contemplation and prayer, a life of holiness.

 The Protestant Reformation, with its return to the Scriptures, brought a different understanding. The call of God to holiness did not mean withdrawal from the world, but serving God in the world. There were no Protestant monasteries. Much of the ornamentation used to denote the holiness of God was cast off—images
and art works in churches, elaborate vestments for the clergy, incense and esoteric practices in the liturgy. The altar, symbolizing the presence of God, was moved from the chancel (from which the people were separated by a wall or a fence) to become the communion table, symbolizing the presence of God in the midst of the people. The elements for the communion service were to be the bread and drink of their common life, and the people were to receive both.

 We seem to have two understandings of holiness. The first might be called “the holiness of the Law,” attained by means of separation from all that is unclean (a cutting off, as in the Hebrew word quadhosh). It means following the guidelines, the customs, the laws that set people apart, separating them from that which
is sinful and unclean. It is a righteousness that we might conceivably approximate. By keeping the commandments, even proximately, I can pat myself on the back. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people” (Luke 18:9–14.) But this kind of holiness can maintain itself only by its very rigidity, and so lacks the
qualities of mercy, forgiveness, and grace, which Nicholas Berdyaev called “the morality beyond morality,” the necessary corollary of love.

 In Jesus Christ we see a second and different kind of holiness. In the New Testament, the understanding of holiness is a holiness of love—not a separation from but an involvement in, not a drawing
back from sinners and sinful situations because my purity might be sullied, but a “going into all the world” and being involved in the business of living, in commerce and labor and politics.

 The holiness of love can be fulfilled only in relationship with God and others. It is a holiness of right relationships, for love is necessarily a relationship. We cannot be righteous in ourselves, no
matter how many things we do or do not do. This holiness is dependent upon our relations with others, upon justice and mercy. It is a higher holiness, a righteousness that “exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees”—not self-righteousness, but righteousness of relationships.

 This is the holiness we see in the life and ministry of Jesus, who was derided as a “friend of publicans and sinners” and denounced as a glutton and a drunkard. He spoke harsh words to those who tried so hard to prove themselves righteous but in their legalism neglected justice and mercy. They would tithe the tiny seeds of herbs, one in ten for God, but they would not help the man who fell among thieves as he lay groaning in the ditch—because such contact might render them impure.

 This is the kind of holiness we see in the incarnation, the holiness of God. Too long have we thought of God up in heaven, a God whose holiness must be satisfied if we are ever to be acceptable in his sight. Because God is holy, he cannot get involved in the dirty, sinful things of this world.

 But the Bible tells us that “God so loved the world” (John 3:16) that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). In fact, the very heart of the gospel is that God does get involved:

 Let Christ himself be your example as to what your attitude should be. For he (Jesus), who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his prerogatives as God’s equal, but stripped himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as mortal man. And, having become man, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying, and the death he died was the death of a common criminal. (Philippians 2:5–8, Phillips translation)

 Dag Hammerskjold, a Swedish statesman who became Secretary General of the United Nations, died in 1961 in a plane crash in the Congo on a mission of peace. He left behind a diary revealing the pilgrimage of a deeply religious man. One of his statements is almost shocking in its simplicity—“In our present era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”

 The call to life in the Spirit of Jesus Christ cannot be a call to leave the world or any part of the world in a self-seeking quest for holiness. Christian holiness is a call to get involved in the world that God loves—that scarred, sinning, corrupt, hurting world that in its anxiety and self-concern has turned from God. It is a call to
action, to get involved, and to take risks. It is a call to go into those places where there is hurt and confusion, where there may be immorality and injustice. In the words of George MacLeod of Iona:

 I simply argue that the Cross be raised again at the centre of the market place as well as on the steeple of the Church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a Cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, on a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek . . .; at the kind of place where cynics talked smut, and thieves cursed, and soldiers gambled. Because that is where He died and that is what He died about, that is where Church people should be and what Church people should be about. (from Reading the Bible for the Love of God, pp. 115f.)