Well I am really frustrated for having decided to join the folks doing 40 days 40 miles I have been told by my doctor that unless I rest I will become very ill. My thyroid is playing up with abnormal readings and I have swollen glands. I had a blood test today and have to go back to the surgery on Monday for the results.
My family have been really helpful today, and I am trying not to be grumpy or too much of a perfectionist about housework. Rest is not something I am good at, I encourage other people to rest and take Time for themselves, but usually end up feeling guilty and making everyone around me uncomfortable in the process.
I wonder has someone been praying that I might learn patience again...I really wish they wouldn't...
On the plus side I have had time for some reading, I have a major assignment due at the end of this semester with a great title
Is there and should there be a Methodist theology. Discuss...
I've been reading "Unmasking Methodist Theology" and was really amused by the chapter entitled Theology within Church structures...here is the quote that got me;
Pythagoras theorem may be stated in twenty four words, The Lords prayer in its traditional English form has only seventy words, and Archimedes Principle is similarly brief (sixty seven words). The ten commandments can be listed using 179 words but the Constitutional Practise and Discipline of the Methodist Church (CPD) uses 225,966 words-to tell us what?......
......The tendency to regulate is deeply embed-ed in the Methodist psyche.
You think?
I wonder where that tendency comes from, is this pragmatism gone mad?
What I see is a deep desire to be culturally relevant and Biblicaly sound at the same time, to ensure this is the case there is a tendency to tie ourselves in knots. I am not a born and raised Methodist, but it is within the Methodist Church that I have found a home, I love the fact that every member is valued and that Lay Ministry is both accepted and valued. I love the prominence of grace in our theology...but I wonder do we really need to tie ourselves in knots with words?
And yet we are like all expressions of Gods church a work in process...I have been a member of a number of different traditions and see in each glimpses of Gods glory, and hear in each echoes of Christ and rejoice in the fact that we are one, and one day we will all be able to celebrate that together all barriers laid aside...
For now I will let the questions lie and live with the tension of that...
"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foriegn language
Do not search for answers
which could not be given to you now
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything
Live with the questions now.
Perhaps then,
Someday far in the future,
You will gradually,
Without even noticing it,
Live your way into the answers."-Rainer Maria Rilke
