| | Yesterday I spent most of the day setting up our bookshelves in the living room. This was actually an incredibly comforting process. I love my books. They are beautiful. I like what they say about me. I would like it more if I had read them all. Again on the image thing… I like the idea of who I might be if I had read all of them.
But ideas are important to me. David Taylor told me a long time ago that he wanted to be a shepherd of ideas and a shepherd of people. That seems to be a fairly good job description for a pastor. I feel called to be a cultural critic. Culture seems to be this rushing river that grabs you and sweeps you downstream. I feel “grabbed” when I am consumed with ‘want’-- whether it is for stuff or fame or significance or power. There are times when I feel like I just want to step into this river for a bit, feel the water. But as soon as I do, I’m grabbed, pulled along. What are my symptoms of grabbedness? Stress, dissatisfaction, impatience with my family… not sure. It seems like it would be helpful to define 2 things: first the river and its appeal, its characteristics and second, to a deeper extent what it looks like when I am bobbing along, my head barely above the surface.
But I ask the question primarily because I get excited about the role of a pastor in relation to the river. It seems that the pastor-- as cultural critic, shepherd of ideas and truth, and actively engaged as shepherd of people-- it seems that it is the pastor who installs poles deep into the riverbed. Poles that can stand against the rushing current, that are constant. Poles that folks who are rushing along, carried by the ‘mainstream’ can grab for life, for respite, for bearing, for orientation. I want to work on my wording of that because it sounds polemical and it is meant to be descriptive. Are some descriptions polemical by their very nature? The very act or vocation of being a ‘pole planter’ is polemical because in its nature you are saying there is a river that needs poles…
I am glad I get three years to wrestle on this nascent idea. I’ve got a lot of reflection, thinking, and processing to do.
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| | Posted 7/18/2004 7:43 AM - 26 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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