Sittin on the Front Porch

My brother is a kook. You'd have to know him to fully appreciate his humor. He is known for saying and doing really crazy things. He coins these really profound sayings - things like "Never eat more than you can lift" or "Every time you go some place, there you'll be" or my personal favorite "You can pick your nose and you can pick your friends, but you can't wipe your friends on the couch". To prove the shallowness of the body of Christ, he used to walk through the foyer of the church several times, bating people to say "How are you doing?" And when they did, he would answer "Terrible". 90% of the time they never noticed or didn't care enough to explore what might be making things terrible. It seemed pretty obvious that Christian brothers and sisters didn't REALLY want to know how he was doing. We just say the words - we don't really mean them.

Shouldn't we be the ones actually caring for each other? I mean, wouldn't that be the least we could do? I guess I should be talking about the MOST we could do, but it seems like we haven't gotten the LEAST done yet. We remain on the front porch of each other's lives and don't get into the stuff of life very well. I guess that is partly because we don't open up, and partly because the receivers don't really want to know.

I was at a Bible study the other day. We argued over Calvin Vs. Armenian doctrine. We argued over the Bible being infallible. We talked about the correctness of (XXX) denomination. I sat there and wondered if we might get a little farther in our walk if we threw the whole book out and just did one thing - love. It is pretty much agreed that the Bible is about love. It says it pretty clear several hundred places. But do we do it? I mean lets face it - we have a choice. Keep chasing our own tails about who is right and who is wrong, or argue about what end of the egg to baptise first, or whether the real meaning in Greek is this or that- or we can take what we do understand and just do it.

We don't really get to know each other. Instead of entering in with each other, we stay on the front porch of life, talking about the casual, remaining safe in the shallow talk. "How about the Cubs? Think this is their year?" (Can you tell I was Illinois born and raised?) Needless to say the Cubbies STILL haven't won, and neither do we tend to get past the superficial, to the stuff that really matters about being family - brothers and sisters in a common Papa.