Asiel's Musings

Yesterday was one of those sad days working in community. A young man who has already spent over a year in a juvenile remand centre, who used to carry a gun, who has been on the run from the police in the past, now desperatley trying to walk the legal pathway, find himself a job came to me in a very bitter mood. He had been walking around town trying to find a job in a supermarket. One enterprise asked him to bring in a resume (the poor youth had never even heard the word before), then they asked him to bring in a recommendation. I assisted him with getting both. Then they asked him to come for an interview and take with him a signed photogrpah by a notary public. This he got and went. He was practically interrogated and then summariuly dismissed simply on the basis of his home address. This after he literally begged and pleaded with the boss to give him the job. Just because of where he lives he was sent home still jobless. He was fuming, he was so disappointed, I could see him fighti...

It has been said that the church is so unlike the armies of the wolrd in that we kill or ignore the wounded. We often get puffed up when someone falls into a sin. We so often kill the fallen brother, especially with sins of a sexual nature, as if they have gone beyond the grip of grace. How easy it is for us to sit in judgment against the fallen brother forgetting that we are just as fallible. Just a prone to wander and leave the God we love... The fallen brother needs the community at that time more than any other. Rather than finding love and acceptance, he finds rejection and scorn as if he has become a leper. I find that we are so eager to have grace meted out to us yet so stingy with grace. It betrays a false understanidng or no understanding of grace itself to withhold it from one who needs it... One of the modern classics for me has to be Phillip Yancey's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" I highly recommed it. There we are taken into the belly of Grace, be prepa...