Discipleship Letters 71-72

Discipleship Letter 71                               Jan. 24^th, 2010

“Stewardship appears in our life as our discipleship leads us toward new responsibilities and greater personal authority. But we do not experience these invitations of religious maturity in a social vacuum. The structures of our families and our churches can foster this religious development or frustrate it.” [Evelyn E. Whitehead and James D. Whitehead, Christian Adulthood: A Journey of Self-Discovery (Liguori: Liguori, 2005), p. 56.]

In Christian adulthood, we have to deal with the context that we are in. it either fosters or frustrates religious maturity. For me, I start to realize that in order to foster religious maturity, any form of frustration that we experience in life or ministry is part of God’s nurturing process.

Learning to deal with frustration itself is a formational process. Stewardship means managing the property of others. Christian stewardship means that Christians manage God’s properties that have been entrusted to us. Thus, as God’s stewards, we must learn to manage frustration as God’s “property” that we receive from Him through the context and the people within it.

When Jesus sent messengers ahead to a Samaritan village to prepare for his arrival, the people of the village did not welcome Jesus. “When James and John saw this, they said to Jesus, ‘Lord, should we call down fire from heaven to burn them up?’ But Jesus turned and rebuked them.” (Luke 9:51-55) At the end of 9:55, some manuscripts add—“And he said, ‘You don’t realize what your hearts are like’” or “And he said, ‘you do not know what manner of spirit you are of.’” In a context that either fosters or frustrates, God wants us to realize what our hearts are like.

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Discipleship Letter 72                               Jan. 31^st, 2010

“…Flaws and faithfulness do not supplant each other but coexist. We all bear wounds. His [Henri Nouwen] came from anxiety over sexual identity and a hypersensitivity to rejection. Mine come most form family and church. Others come from chronic illness or deep pain. We can live as victims, blaming God or someone else for our misfortune; or, following Nouwen, we can allow those wounds to drive us to God.” [Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church (New York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 307.]

Everybody bears wounds. We live with them; we grow with them; we deal with them. Philip Yancey’s wound comes from the church. “Every writer has one main them, a spoor that he or she keeps sniffing around, tracking, following to its source. If I had to define my own theme, it would be that of a person who absorbed some of the worst the church has to offer, yet still landed in the loving arms of God. Yes, I went through a period of rejection of the church and God, a conversion experience in reverse that felt life liberation for a time. I ended up, however, not as an atheist, a refugee from the church, but as one of its advocates.” (pp. 7-8)

To a certain extent, I consider Philip Yancey is a very cynical person. But his cynicism does not destroy his faith. Rather, it has led him to a higher ground. Because of his theme, he discovers more of God—a unique aspect of God. His voice makes me think that I should not downplay your theme and make it irrelevant regarding with your soul searching.