Walking Together
What do you think of when you hear the expression, "There are some things money just can't buy?"
Health comes to mind for me.
Whenever I visit the sick, I am reminded of that. It is true that the more money we have, the greater our chances of finding the best the care, but the advantage doesn't last as long as we would like.
What about happiness?
If I am unhappy without money, shouldn't I be happier with it?
But Peter said to him, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God's gift with money! - Acts 8:20
In today's reading, we have Peter taking a stand, quite angrily, against a man who wants to buy the ability to give the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Obviously, to Peter, the man has no idea what he is asking. But how could he?
What we don't understand, we interpret. We project the idea of something we know onto the things we don't know, and we make the assumption that they are alike.
If I don't know what it is like to be rich or poor, I look for examples, if not in real life, then in movies or books, and I say that's what it is like.
The man in the story thought Peter to be a wizard or magician, someone who could teach him a trick, or show him how to conjure up a spirit.
As the commercial goes, "That's what he does."
But we really can't know what something is like until we experience it ourselves. We can't know what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit, if we haven't received it.
As Christians we are called to share this experience with others, but how do we do that?
What probably comes to mind first is to evangelize, to call the person to become a Christian and receive the Holy Spirit.
We can't force that upon them, though that has been tried in the past, and I am not so sure we can say it was successful, even though it resulted in many new Christians, if they survived.
I think we should walk with the person side by side, respecting the path he is on, seeing how much it means to him, and showing him how much ours means to us.
It's a radical concept, but I think it is better than ranting at each other.
Do you agree?
Oh, but you don't need to agree with me. We just need to choose to walk together.
More to come...