Age faith piece
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 at 07:16PM While I was away, I managed to get a faith piece in The Sunday Age. Here it is:
My friend Sheila approached me a little sheepishly after church one day. ‘I’m a bit embarrassed to ask you this, she said, but I wondered if there’s a tartan hanky of mine at your place?’ She’d lent it to us four years ago, she explained, at a friend’s 50th, a barbeque, to shade my hatless husband’s bald head. ‘It’s just that it was given to me by a favourite cousin,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask for ages.’
As it happened, I had been sorting my clothes cupboard that weekend, and had found a hanky that I knew wasn’t mine. Turned out it was the missing one, and Sheila and her sentimental handkerchief were happily reunited the next time I saw her.
Her care belongs to another era and touched me deeply in an age where everything from cameras to relationships are often seen as disposable. It reminded me of our almost 100-year-old beach shack which has a rickety old cupboard full of wooden coat hangers labelled with my grandmother’s details: ‘C.S. Paton, The Hut’. Yes, even coat hangers were valued and treasured once.
Sheila and her hanky also remind me of stories that Jesus made up and told to his friends and followers. ‘There was once a woman’, he says, and goes on to tell of this person who had ten coins and lost one, but didn’t give up searching until she had found it. Or the shepherd who had 99 sheep safely tucked up in his fold but left them to seek all over until he had found the one that had wandered off from its fellows.
That’s what God is like, was the point of the parable. God loves us like that woman, like that shepherd. If one of us is adrift, lost, confused, alone, God knows and won’t rest till we are returned to community and love and belonging.
I think of what it’s like being parent with a bunch of kids. Three of them can be getting along with you and each other and life just fine, but if one is unhappy, you work away till you’ve figured out what, if anything, can be done.
In another part of the gospel story, Jesus is quoted as saying that God knows when the smallest sparrow falls to earth. It’s not just the church people God cares about. It’s every last adult and child, every part of creation. I don’t begin to understand how God does this, but the God that Jesus revealed is one who cares about and searches for every last individual. Sheila, with her obvious delight at being reunited with her scrap of tartan material, reminded me of these vivid stories and the unstintingly loving God that Jesus talked about.
Reader Comments (1)
Welcome back after your travels Clare.
I've just returned from a few days in Brisbane with my brother, John, my only sibling. It's always great to see him and laugh and talk with him. I like that third last paragraph - it is reassuring to know that God keeps returning us 'to the fold'. Have a great weekend.