Doing it for Wool Lady

I was shopping a few weeks ago for some cheap craft materials, and took a whole pile of things up to the till. Each item was only a pound or two, and the whole bill was less than £10. After I had paid, I thought it actually seemed a bit too good to be true, so checked the receipt - sure enough the cashier had missed some wool off . Woohoo, a freebie!


No, I thought, do the right thing and go and pay for it.


It's only worth a couple of quid, I thought next. What's the point? And she'll think I'm really strange going back to pay for such a low cost item. I hate it when people think I'm strange.


But the right thing is to pay for it so I'd better go and do it, I thought, a bit begrudgingly. Ok, God, I'll do it for you, I said in my head.


No, said a thought that popped into my head unbid, You're not doing it for me. You're doing it for her.


I took the item back and paid for it, and she did look at me a bit funny.


Since then, I keep thinking about what happened, and the sudden thought I had: You're doing it for her.


Over the past three or four years, I've felt out of sorts with the faith that I have been raised in, and the explanations I've heard for what it is I'm meant to believe in. One of the big things for me is the separation of humankind and God that seems to be lurking in the background all the time. I'm increasingly convinced that we've got this wrong, and lost touch with a vital part of our spirituality.



I'm convinced that the message that Jesus taught, is that God dwells in humanity, and makes his home here. And not just with the good people, the church people or the religious ones, but all of us. After all, he's the God who called himself 'Emanuel' (meaning 'God with us'.) Isn't the message of the incarnation that he's a God in human skin, with human bones and human blood, just like….


...everyone?

We so love to divide and separate and sort things into categories. It gives us a sense of control in an uncontrollable world. Jesus taught against this sort of thinking when he said about God's presence, 'You won't be able to say, 'Here it is!' or 'It's over there!' For the Kingdom of God is within you." 

I've been taught to immediately apply some divisive thinking to that piece of teaching: "Ah yes, he's talking to Christians, of course. The presence of God is definitely within Christians. But not anyone else, we all know that. That's the problem." Except that when Jesus was alive, there weren't any Christians, so whoever he was saying that to, it definitely wasn't a church-goer. So Jesus is telling someone who has never stepped foot in a church or prayed a special prayer, that God's presence is 'within you.'

One of Jesus's earliest followers described the spiritual journey as one in which we increasingly discover and live out of our truest, deepest selves. He said that our true selves reflect the reality found in God, and so we need to move beyond the division and separation that we involve ourselves in, because 'here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.' It's a new way of seeing. A unifying, pulling-together-rather-than-separating kind of seeing. 

This man, Paul, went around blowing conventional seeing and thinking out of the water. It was controversial. In his day, it was the Jews who thought they had something other people (the Gentiles) didn't have. In my circles, we Christians have been taught that it's us who have exclusive access to the presence of God living within us. (Which means we then feel the need to go round telling everyone else what they have to do to get what we think only we have got. Which is stressful.) But Paul went out of his way to dismantle this kind of thinking. 'There's a mystery! It's been hidden from previous generations, but now we can see it clearly! God has wanted to make known the glory of the riches of this mystery among the gentiles (i.e., among everyone, ever. Let me just restate that - the beautiful, glorious, mystery is among the 'gentiles'. That's everyone.) And the mystery is this: CHRIST IS IN YOU.' 

Woohoo, woohoo!!!! Christ is in you!!! Whoever you are, wherever you are, Christ is in you! The suffering, compassionate, tender, patient, loving, beautiful, powerful, gentle, wise, ageless, life-giving, thirst-quenching, tear-drying, spirit-lifting one is within you! Just say yes to what already is, and what always has been true. That's all that's needed. He wants to show you how to live in his ways, which are all just different ways of being Love. Listen, and he'll show you. 


When I think like this, some of the other stuff Jesus said starts to make more sense. He said that when I finally meet my maker he will say 'well done' for the time I went to visit him in prison. What? But God, when did I visit you in prison? Well, when you went to visit Llewelyn that time, actually that was me, because I am Christ within Llewelyn. (And it means he might also say, I was hungry and you ignored me - where were you?)


If God identifies himself with people, then when I love people, I love God. Or to put it a different way, if I want to love God, I have to love people. If I want to serve God, then I have to serve people. If I want to know God, I have to know people.


It doesn't make sense anymore to divide and separate my world into 'things I do for God' and 'everything else'. When I took the ball of wool back to the cashier in the craft shop and paid up, it wasn't extra holy or extra special because I did it for God. It was good because it was for a human.



This is The Way that Jesus calls us to. A life spent loving people and loving God, because God is in people and people are in God.

 It's messy and unglamorous, but it's rich beyond measure.