From the Outside Looking In

I met up with Bet tonight, my German friend who is very new to the things of God. I took her to meet a Group of German speaking people who are from, or loosely connected to our church. It was eye opening for me to be sitting with a group of Christians looking at them through her eyes. I nearly died… No wonder people think Christians are weird.

Don’t get me wrong the leaders of the group are dedicated, genuine believers and the nicest people but the evenings events were cheesy in the extreme.

We had, as instructed, brought fruit to exercise the new juicing machine so were making all kinds of weird and wonderful combinations of fruit and vege juices… and thus began the evening…

We then played an ice breaking game – sorry, no offence meant to enthusiastic game players – But Bet and I could well have done without it… (it was right up there with silly baby shower games…)

Then we each spent some time meditating on things we would like the group to pray for, shared those things with the group and then sharing one thing with the group that we would like to see happen in our world in the next 12 months. Finally each person took a turn to pray for the person on their right and the group nodded and Amened in agreement. (All of these activities took quite some time to complete and were done so with great hilarity and guttural consonants)

Remember, I am sitting there with a girl who is not a Christian… I am thinking any minute now she is going to ask me to take her home… I am also thinking this is not even normal behaviour for me and I can do the Pentecostal two step with the best of them… However, Bet appeared to be unawed by the proceedings and so I was happy that I was the one allotted to pray for her. Her request? She is in the process of waiting to hear if her current employer is successful in their application to sponsor her so that she can stay in Australia and so I had the opportunity to pray that the application would be approved as was her desire.

In her turn, Bet offered to pray for her alloted person, and made amusing remarks to the effect that she was new to this talking to Gott stuff so could Trill, the man she was praying for keep it short! It was great!!! She is a real laugh and her sense of humour is very well suited to Australian culture. She prayed confidently, at least I think so, she was praying in German… remember… of the 11 of us there I am the only one with no more than 3 words of German… so spent a lot of the eveing observing.

I dropped her off home and we laughed about the interesting people we had met… Happily there were a couple of slightly normal people there and Bet exchanged phone numbers with them…

Tomorrow she is coming to stay the night and watch romantic dvd’s with me. I think we are going to be in for a great night – might be worth getting a bottle of wine in (hmm wine… lovely stuff).

God is a bit of a crack up – at lest some of his people are… But I have to tell you this business of making a difference in a person’s life feels great even if it means a laugh at our own expense some time…