Life Enriching

I marvel.

I spent years, and years and years at the mercy of my inferiority complex which was all centred around the fact that it was Christianity that made me and my family different (read socially retarded) from everyone else. From my school years right through most of my 20’s this fear prevented me from developing any kind of relationship with anybody outside the church circles I moved in.

Tragic. Ghastly.

The reason I have been mulling this over is that I spent the evening with Bet and 2 other girls this evening, none of whom are involved in church related activities and we passed the time away playing cards… Worse still, there was money at stake*… to compound the whole scenario further, we plan to do it again in 2 weeks… and finally, to add insult to injury … we are playing at my house.

Hah… she says… thumbing her nose at convention.

Gasp… I know, a veritable scandal, and my Baptist ancestors will be striking my name from the family plot in heaven… But we had a great time, there was no barrier of creed, a language barrier yes…. 2 of the participants are German, the other a fluent German speaker so I was the minority in more ways than one, but none of that mattered… we laughed ourselves silly (contributed in no small part by the excellent bottle of Shiraz on the table … egads… I’m on a slippery slope now…) and I believe we could be well on the way to developing great friendships.

“The church” has a lot to answer for in having alienated people whose lives could have been vastly different if there were less people like me spending years sticking to the safety of the familiar and more spending time and being the kind of person in “the world” who loves God but loves people too. I mean, it wasn’t as if He shut himself away in the temple and didn’t meet with the great “unwashed” was it? Sadly, it was that behaviour which belonged to the very people who asassinated him…

Anyway, I am loving having a friend who is introducing me to more people than I would have had the privilege of meeting otherwise, giving me the opportunities to do fun things I wouldn’t normally do. That’s Life Enriching… as life enriching as worship, as prayer and as the study of Scripture. (And you know, I wouldn’t be lying if I said, it felt as though it were sometimes even more so…)

*A grand total of $8.00 was pooled at the end of the night contributed in most part by yours truly owing to the most points gathered at the end of the inaugural evening of “International” rules Rummy (Romme)