Pastor's Corner - Cornerstone Newsletter
This article was submitted by Pastor Steve to the Cornerstone Newsletter for January.
Happy New Year! I do hope your Christmas was meaningful and not crammed with too many activities so as to be hectic and stressful. If it was, I hope you are now recovering nicely. I was just re-reading an article that I wrote last January on year-end reflections and New Years resolutions. I asked four questions that come from writer, Robert Fulghum. They are what he calls "the great Mother Questions." They are:
- WHAT ON EARTH HAVE YOU DONE?
- WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD ARE YOU DOING?
- WHAT WILL YOU THINK OF NEXT?
- WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
I love these questions. Why don't you take five minutes or so right now and prayerfully reflect on these questions. Call it your New Year's reflections. What if we wrote these down on slips of paper and posted them around the house or in our cars or work places, so as to be confronted by them regularly. They are certainly food for thought.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the absurd. Before Christmas, I read this little article in the Sac Bee about singer/performer Madonna. She had been in Chile for two concerts at the National Stadium in Santiago, where 60,000 fans were expected for each concert. A Roman Catholic Cardinal named Jorge Medina made the following statement: "This woman comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner, she provokes a crazy enthusiasm of lust, lustful and impure thoughts." Now here's the kicker - Cardinal Medina interrupted a tribute to the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, in order to make this statement. Pinochet, who by the way, was assisted into power by our CIA, was a horribly brutal man. He oversaw the deaths of thousands of dissidents during his rule of Chile from 1973 to 1990.
Now, is Madonna over the top sometimes? Sure. But to be so blind as to celebrate the life of an absolutely brutal dictator and then warn young people away from Madonna is absolutely beyond belief. No wonder some people want nothing to do with religion. We have this history of being overly moralistic about sex while ignoring real issues of justice. In this New Year I will keep an eye open for the absurd and hypocritical, especially in myself.
Hey, I was listening to NPR (National Public Radio) the other day in the car, and a report came on about the drop in charitable giving and how badly non-profits are hurting in our current economic climate. Then a woman was interviewed. I did not catch her name or her credentials. But what she was saying made enormous sense. She said that many people put their charitable giving at the bottom of their expenditure list. Something you do with the left-over money. Consequently, when difficult times come, the bottom of the list goes. She encouraged people to put the money they give to charitable organizations at the top of their lists and to cut back on other things when times get rough. Things like eating out, new clothes, entertainment and travel. I swear this woman did not talk from a church or spiritual perspective but it made enormous spiritual sense to me. Why would we cut first the organizations that nurture life and care for those most in need during difficult times?
What kinds of things are you reflecting on these days?
Pastor Steve
