God’s Grandeur
It’s been a fantastic summer so far! Let’s hope that during the long summer holidays ahead the weather will hold up and provide us with at least occasional sunshine and some of the hot balmy weather that we have already enjoyed.
Our thoughts turn towards the seaside, and some of us may even get near the sea in the next six weeks or so. This reminds me of the story of a man walking along the seashore. He found a stray dog and threw a stick for it into the sea. And off the dog went down to the water. But instead of going into the sea, it trotted across the top of it, picked up the stick, ran back across the water, and dropped the stick at the man’s feet.
The man, amazed, did it again – with the same result. Hardly able to believe his eyes, he called another man to come and see. He threw the stick for the dog again, and exactly the same thing happened; the dog walked over the water and brought the stick back. “That’s astounding”, said the second man. “Absolutely astonishing. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a dog that couldn’t swim!”
What a sad man! His Horizon is determined by the restrictions of his limited imagination. He perceives the exciting and the miracle in terms of the ordinary lacking ordinariness. When God with his Holy Spirit is at work in us, our horizons are lifted and we learn to perceive the extraordinary and the special, the miraculous and the exciting in the ordinary around us. And this is our task as Christian missionaries – for that is what we all need to be – to open our eyes and the eyes of those around us to God’s grandeur.
Bernhard Schünemann
23 July 2017
