Bridging a Conversation Gap - Lizzie Laferton
In our family Bible times we are enjoying Mark’s gospel, and last week's sessions in chapter 5 saw Jesus casting out a legion of impure spirits, a stampeding herd of swine, and a newly restored man begging to go with Christ.
"Jesus did not let him, but said, 'Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you'"(v19). In fact, there's a whole load of reporting going on in this account: those tending the pigs run off to share what had happened, both in this town and in the surrounding countryside (v14); the witnesses to what took place tell those who come in curiosity after the event what has happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs (v16); and after Jesus commands the man go tell, that's exactly what he does in the Decapolis (v20).
Go tell them how much the Lord has done for you
All of which gets both to the heart of sharing the good news and to one of the barriers we often face (or perhaps imagine) in doing so. Christ has done something infinitely more dramatic and eternity-changing by restoring me not to a right mind but to relationship with my heavenly Father, by overcoming not just one set of demons but evil, sin, condemnation, Satan and death for me. How much more exciting is all I have to report!
And yet he didn't do it only moments ago, in a place I can bring people to.
That is to say, the 'how much the Lord has done' of the gospel is so massive, so eternal, so real and yet so intangible, so current and yet so distant, so rooted in history and yet in ways so hard to scrutinize, that it makes me wonder: how do I mimic the people of Mark 5 and rush off declaring what the Lord has done?
What's more, my conversion was 20 years ago and the most dramatically noticeable events – marked changes in attitude, belief, behaviour, priorities etc... – are long past and no longer points of conversation. (That's not to say, of course, that a Christian life of long duration and ongoing and growing Christ-like character shouldn't or won't attract attention – quite the opposite. But it is also true that conversion offers particular opportunities for telling how much the Lord has done for you.)
So, with all that in mind, Mark 5 made me wonder: how do I bridge the gap between everyday conversation "in the town" of Sutton where I live – centred as it most often is on the here-and-now, the what-just-happened, the visible-and-tangible – and the glorious how-much-the-Lord-has-done of the Gospel?
Go tell them of the Lord's hand in all things
There are many possible answers to that question, but Ben gave me food for thought and one possible response over half-term during a return trip from London.
Whenever we disembark at Morden Station, the kids are used to me hurrying them up the steps and through the turnstiles because I can't bear the thought of watching the Number 80 we've just missed drive off because we sauntered up instead. It probably says many unflattering things about my personality, but there is great satisfaction in timing our fast walk/run such that we arrive at the stop just as the live arrivals announce the next bus is due. Last week the bus was already paused there when we emerged from the Underground (oh the woe!), but an unaccountable absence of traffic on the two roads we had still to cross, combined with a long queue of people still mounting and a Laferton sprint, saw us make it aboard. At which point Ben declared happily, "Wow, God is so kind!"
I've been pondering that utterance a fair amount since. Not just because it fills me with joy that he sees God's sovereign hand in the day-to-day details of our lives, though it does. And not because it's unusual for us to recognise and point out kindnesses from God in the small things of our day during our family activities and conversations, though we don't do that as much as we ought. But because it suddenly made me realise how slow I am to do likewise in conversations outside my Bible study group or home contexts.
In short, in general conversation with friends or neighbours, I am slow to acknowledge and articulate, as Ben did, all that the Lord has done for me in the details of my day, let alone in the details of my salvation. I am slow to declare the goodness, kindness, patience, grace, gifts, met needs, sustaining, and answered prayer received from the Lord during conversations about the here-and-now and what-just-happened. When asked how my day has been, I don't tend to start my sentence with ‘God + verb’. I don't speak of what he has done for me that day, even though it was he who granted me a good night's sleep, and listened to my prayer as I ran, and gave me the guidance I asked for as I wrote a Bible study, and provided an opportunity to learn patience and humility by allowing my plans for the day to be slightly thwarted, and gave me encouragement just when I needed it by stirring someone to message me with a kind word at just the right moment, and bestowed the gift of a family mealtime full of laughter, and provided not just food to sustain us but a new, tasty recipe that brought us joy, and mercifully showed me my sin in a tense conversation and reminded me of the grace at the cross, and... I could go on.
Perhaps this is one way to bridge the gap: to talk about all the Lord has done for us today, in the small things, so that to talk about all he has done in Christ, for eternity, in the single most important feature of our lives seems less of a conversational stretch, either for us or for the people accustomed to our conversation.
And I suspect that speaking regularly and naturally of a sovereign, loving, merciful, redeeming, sanctifying, all-powerful God, and talking of him as the origin of all the good things we enjoy, and acknowledging that he is sustaining and directing the world at every level from the atomic to the stellar, will attract attention and, we pray, interest.
May it be said of our day-to-day conversation about the here-and-now that "all the people were amazed" (v20).
