You think we’ve arrived? Seriously?
A great man once travelled to a village. He spent some time there talking to the villagers about priorities and values, love and generosity, justice and mercy. Before he left, he gave them a beautiful gift. He gave them instructions to share the gift and told them what the gift was for. The villagers were grateful but they weren’t completely clear on the specifics of the gift. Where did it come from, what was it made out of, what else could you do with it? Some of the villagers filled in the blanks and started spinning elaborate tales, some were determined to keep the original purity of the facts of the gift as far as they knew it, everyone developed their own understanding of the gift. Generations went by and most people forgot about the visitor and his messages while he was with them, they were too preoccupied with the gift.
One day, a man became convinced that his people had lost the true meaning of the gift, they had become power hungry and distracted from the joy of living a life of love, generosity, justice and mercy. Because of the stories he read about the visitor and the visitor’s message, he knew they had started getting things wrong. So he started a revolution of information that stirred many of the visitors. The others believed they held the true facts of the gift and knew its story the best and they rejected the message of this man.
This pattern of information revolution continued, each time, the previous revolutionaries were convinced that THEY held the true story of the gift and rejected the others, even though their minds had been changed only a handful of years prior. Meanwhile, the gift sat in a storage room, covered with layers of dust and other junk that had been tossed in and the memory of the gift giver continued to fade.
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That’s a beautiful tale. I wonder what inspired it…..:)
actually it was a conversation David and I were having about infant baptism. We just started visiting a local ELCA church and we were talking about Lutheran theology and David said the whole baptism thing always throws him and I said i’d have to read the official statement about it and that got me thinking about the reformation and it struck me as very goofy that protestants think we can’t reconsider our theology when we’ve been doing it for centuries.
very nice, Mak!
[...] Makeesha’s Parable [...]
good story, it makes me think that there is both the new and the old, its about rediscovery as well as new discovery…
“Meanwhile, the gift sat in a storage room, covered with layers of dust and other junk that had been tossed in and the memory of the gift giver continued to fade.”
What a thought provoking warning. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Thanks.