Greg Boyd the possible backslider...

Greg Boyd doesn't blog often, and sometimes what he blogs about is more about his family than his spiritual life (yeah, yeah, I know, the family is part of the spiritual and vice versa).

However in his most recent post he talks about how easy it is for him to be a backslider. I know this isn't a word used in all Christian circles. For those to whom it's unfamiliar, it usually denotes someone who's slipping away from the faith, day by day, and will eventually - most likely - lose their faith altogether.

Boyd isn't quite in that category, but this is how he opens his post:

I suspect I’m more carnal than most, but I’m stunned at how easy it is for me to “backslide.” I’m not talking about falling into some heinous sin. I just find I gravitate strongly toward an atheistic consciousness. I’ll go for a couple of days easily remaining aware of God’s presence, moment-by-moment, but then I’ll go through a long period of slumber during which my God-awareness is spotty at best. This is how its been with me, more or less, for more than 20 years!

There are only a couple more paragraphs to the post - Boyd is succinct at the best of times.

More than a bit more about Boyd.

Wellness - from a Maori writer's perspective

In a video on the Perspectives on Wellbeing page of the Mental Health Foundation of NZ's website, Maori language scholar and author Ruth Makuini Tai talks about finding out who you really are - by leaving behind the 'other' voices in your life, as well as providing new insights into the meaning of 'aroha' and the simple greeting 'kia ora' (which turns out to say considerably more in those six letters than you'd think).

The video runs for a couple of minutes, maybe three, and Ruth packs a good deal into that short space of time. I can't link directly to the video, because it's not a You Tube-type, so here's the address.

On the same page, there's another video, this time by Judi Clements, in which she discusses the five ways everyone can support their own wellbeing and that of the world around them, including family, friends, colleagues and the wider community. The five ways are connecting, being active, taking notice, learning and giving.

Stats and Stories

As someone who spends a good deal of his working week checking out stats and figures, trying to make sense of what's happening in the world by looking at charts and tables, it was good to have a reminder from the Maxim Institute's newsletter that it's easy to lose track of the real people behind all the numbers. I quote:
We need a medium which will tell us the same truth as research reports, but one which is able to move us, to touch our hearts, and compel us to act. In fact, we need stories. An article in the Journal of Development Studies released earlier this year suggested just that—that the hidden power of the novel is a much undervalued spur to thought and action. Ask most people what they know about life in Afghanistan and they are much more able to summon up images of what they read in The Kite Runner (one of the books referred to in the study) than they are to talk about what they didn't read in Supporting the Development of Children's Groups and Networks in Afghanistan: Reflections on Practice and Possibilities.
and...
The power of a novel differs from that of a report—it comes from its recognition that human beings have stories. Instead of merely words on a page, the story they encompass becomes one we can relate to, one in which we can join. The world is far from simple and there are issues that matter deeply all around us. But amidst the "cacophony of voices" we need to hear the voice of the one—whether it asks for justice or freedom or compassion. And in this lies the power of the writer because it is characters, faces and stories which have the power to connect us individually with the issues of importance, to persuade us that they matter, to bring them in all their force before our shaded eyes.

This is why, in the National Mission Office, we're always looking for stories, about people, about the way mission is being done in a particular church or parish or presbytery, about failures, and successes. About real human beings rather than numbers. We love numbers, and they do tell us things that stories don't, but they're not the be all and end all.

If you have stories to tell, why not drop me a line on my email? You'll find it by clicking on the profile.