The Cost Of Being A Blessing

Disused National petrol station by Peter M Dean on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Methodist minister Graham Peacock links to a beautiful story about a Pakistani man whose business was effectively closed off by roadworks, but who was rescued by a local church urging its members to buy their petrol from him. This is a simple example of Christians blessing the community, but Graham raises issues around the cost of being such a blessing:

* If you just commute to a church you like several miles away, your impact on the local community will be lessened.

* To sustain a consistent attitude of blessing the community requires that Christians are more than just nice to each other – we need to build one another up.

* Our wallet will be affected.

* We need to ‘expand our family’.

* We need to know the local community.

Read Graham’s article and see what you think. Are we willing to pay a cost in order to bless our communities, as God undoubtedly wants us to?

Random Acts Of Kindness

The Digital Evangelism Issues blog recently carried a post called ‘Paying It Forward‘. It builds on the idea that when we have a kindness shown to us,  we cannot always repay our debt of gratitude to the person who showed care for us. So we find someone else to bless instead. We ‘pay forward’, instead of ‘paying back’. The nature of our paying forward has to be unconditional: we have no expectation of return. There was a Kevin Spacey film inspired by this idea. The DEI blog post links this with the Engel Scale, showing where people might be on their spiritual journey into faith, and the Gray Matrix, which plots sympathy and resistance towards the Gospel. The blog also embeds this Thai video:

How can our acts of unconditional love demonstrate the Good News and pave the way for words about Jesus?