This Modern Love

If this works, this will be the first time Ive sucessfully blogged from my cell phone!

In my recent sucumbings to ebay fever I bought a small bluetooth keyboard (a Nokia SU-8W for all the geeks out there) and have been happily tapping out emails and text messe]ages on my daily commute from Aberdeen (Scotland, UK) to Fraserburgh which takes around 1hr30 then a shorter 20 min ride to a village called st combs.

The wonders of modern technology then that I can watch, yes watch the news, the weather, surf the net, send emails and schedule my life on my phone.

As Napolean Dynamite once said: "I love Technology..." and I always have, from the day the guy came to fix our first PC when I was about 13 and I pointed asking "whats that" and "what does it do" and "why is that connected to that", even before when I would turn my sega megadrive cartridges upside down and blow in them to get them to work, and wonder at what could be contained in the chip inside it.

The problem has really been that conceptually Ive enjoyed the prospect and the possiblities of technology but I never had the money (or social inablility) to fully actualize the use of it.

Much like blogging really, Ive always seen the potential, and the great concepts it contains but never utilized them for my own good.

So maybe this (Blogging on a bus) is one step closer to doing that, using technolgy for its function instead of its concept.

I think as Church as well we've taught conceptualizing as seperate from actualizing, and so kept the Church from realising, because unlike the geekiness of technology, Church doesn't require money or social inability to understand or to play the game. We've been mad at church congregations and Christians for not being missionally minded, communicating to them that they are missing the point, while at the same time, saying that in order to be sucessful or to be a "good Christian" we have to know before we go.

This isnt a blog against theology, I chose to study theology, or at discipling/feeding congregations but that we sometime try and clean people up before we send them out, and then mission becomes foreign to them, something they force, something they perform at, when what it was meant to be all along was telling the people around you the good news.

Is this right? Or should we send every convert to seminary before they speak to another non Christian.

It seems to me that the way Jesus discipled the 12 was to hit the ground running, let them make a few mistakes but give the space to live out what they were learning.

I can be way too afraid of making mistakes, and can be far too judgemental of other people who make mistakes when Jesus is maybe just saying walk out what you know in the best way you can, because obedience is the highest form of Worship. Today I want to not just learn to tolerate people and their mistakes but love them for them, for what God has put into their life, for the way that Jesus sees them, because he thought it was worth giving it all up for them. Not just to them through their circumstances, not just because of their circumstances but despite their issues and problems.