If you were ever a kid, have kids or have witnessed kids than you are familiar with the childhood past-time of ‘playing house’. The idea is simple and typically rises out of children naturally and without any lessons or urging by adults and parents.

As a child I was close to my cousins but I was a rarity given that I was a boy and most of my cousins were girls. As such I was designated the role of “husband”. The nature of the game is that the roles are determined by your context and experience. In our context, as the husband, my role was to leave and go to work. That was pretty much it. The man in my context was usually not around but culture had dictated that a certain role is played by man and therefore there must be one and so I was it and as I said my task was simply to get up and go to work and come home at the end of the day.

Generally speaking it was the girls who were in charge of everything which really was reflective of of our context and environment. We all grew up in single-mother households where men were transitional. The mothers had to be in charge, there was no other option and so in our game of house the mother’s were in charge as well.

What were we doing? We were little people learning how to be big people through play. We had fun. We were not aware of gender roles, appropriate or otherwise, we were simply acting out what we saw around us.

As a parent, uncle, adult I have witnessed this phenomena of ‘playing house’ and it always makes me smile. I appreciate the creativity and the effort of it all and I also recognize that despite all the work these kids have not come even remotely close to what it means to be an adult. It doesn’t matter. What mattered to me watching the kids was that they were enjoying themselves…that they were practicing to be what they would one day become based upon the models they had before them. What mattered to me as a kid was that I had fun as I attempted to practice at being the man I was supposed to become based on the models I had before me.

I wonder sometimes if God looks at us and sees something similar. Lots of unformed children playing at house. I wonder if our efforts at church, various other forms of worship, prayer, marriage and life in general are a form of ‘playing house’ as we seek to become…

What we are doing is based on how we understand and interpret our model. What we are doing is not remotely what we are going to become but it matters that we are doing…that we are seeking to become. Unfortunately the consequences of our version of playing house can be significant. People can be hurt, die, damaged in all sorts of ways.

Is it humiliating to have our attempts at life and worship described this way? Maybe it is, in fact, humbling…and this is not necessarily a bad thing. 

To view the world through only one eye is to lack perspective. There is no perception of depth. Things become one dimensional.

To view a person, or a story, or anything really, through the filter of a single perspective is the same. All depth and perspective is lost.

A flat caricature is all that is left; An exaggerated, unrecognizable cartoon.

To come to know or think you know someone or something based on another’s perspective is even worse.

It is like evaluating the world through the wrong end of a telescope. It reduces people and minimize/simplifies them. It is damaging and the one moving through life with such vision is worse than blind…they are deceived.

The best way to understand anything or anyone is up close and personal but this will take all the courage you can muster for people are frightening beasts.

poet was a twisted rag
used to wipe the world clean;
picked up, wrung out

– and –

some noticed beauty
in the Rorschach black
that was left  behind

you should write happier things,
sunnier things that make me smile

well i would but i need to bleed the bad
each keystroke a leach to draw the poison

i suppose this makes sense –
but is there no light to even throw shadow?

there’s a beach where i stand alone
casting away messages in bottles;
sometimes the sun rises before me,
sometimes the sun sets before me

i don’t know what that means
but i like that there’s a beach,
i like that there’s sun before you

i know you do – its what i love about you,
know that for every dark i excommunicate
a little light leaks in and illuminates

see i knew i saw the promise of brighter words
like a coming spring and the return of brilliant birds

they are there i have seen them, i hear them too
so many to come they will fill the over-arching blue

past has given way to a haunted present
filled with hoary ghosts of dead memories
as once-known people shamble nearby;

these old shades have more life now,
they were but distant in days before,
now they hover like lovers in my life
voiceless yearning things – they lean in
secrets to give without a tongue to tell

the fall of some dull leaves
goes unnoticed in the changing season
but the failing grace of one flower
pressed to the surface of welcoming water
may drive an edgy prince to madness
and pull the winter gods howling;

when beauty is the last candle out,
crazy becomes the only light left

When one wishes to minister to pain…to be Christ in and through the pain one should ask if they were Christ in joy.

The story of Lazarus is instructive to us here.

Christ ministers to Lazarus’s sisters in their great hour of need as they mourn the death of their brother.

“Lord had you but been here our brother would not have died.”

Christ looks on confronted by one of the real and very personal consequences of death and as he makes their pain his own it says –

“Jesus wept.”

At this point he looks to the tomb and says simply “Lazarus come forth” and he does.

This is meant to be a demonstration of the resurrection that comes through Christ. Jesus could have demonstrated this by calling forth anyone at any time so why Lazarus? One word –

Relationship.

Christ’s ministry to Mary and Martha’s pain comes out of a relationship that already exists…they expect his ministry in the pain and welcome it BECAUSE he has been there with them through the ordinary times. Christ does not come only in pain – Christ responds to pain the way any friend would…a friend who has always been there.

This is instructive. Surely we can all minister to people in pain and it may be received. However a truly welcome ministry comes from those who have been there in the ordinary times…in the joyous times.

Christ is not merely some happy, morbid invader who breaks into lives at their most miserable – no, he is something entirely more and different. What this means is that so are we.

This is part if what koinonia means – the out working of communal fellowship of those ‘en Christo’.

In short if you want the privilege to be Christ in and through the pain of others then you need also to be Christ in their joy; Christ in their anger; Christ in their regular times.

The difference between a stranger seeking to help and a friend who has been there can be the difference between a balm that may soothe a wound for a while and a healing hand that may take the wound away entirely.

There are other ramifications to this way of thinking. When we find the lonely, the isolated and those outside of community we are driven to enter into genuine relationship with them that they will have someone who will be Christ to them and so doing they will become Christ to others.

An appeal is offered on behalf of the enslaved that in freedom the enslaved might serve in the only way that has value…that the slave might be free to serve the only one worth serving…and in such service find true freedom.

There is a beautiful, contradictory irony such that only God can weave.

Echoes of the exodus are here.

Insights I have gained from my current reading of NT Wright.