Quakers and Hurrying

So the ideas for this blog post have been bouncing around in my head for a couple months, but I just didn't get around to writing them down.

So I've been thinking about how it's so easy to never do today what could be done tomorrow instead... like writing a blog post about procrastinating, right?

Or like trying to help folks in Haiti be prepared for hurricanes.

The trouble is, when it comes to preparing for acts of God, isn't so useful to wait until afterwards to prepare.

So, feel free to say that I'm looking at things through rose-colored glasses way too much here, but I think there's a good side to "acts of God" or whatever you want to call them - the good side I'm seeing is that if life throws challenges at us, we often rise up to meet them and we really enjoy the process of learning to overcome them, too. Mind you, I could live without any challenges the size of hurricanes.

Anyway, one of the things that I think God sometimes does by giving me difficult circumstances in life, is tell me to get off my lazy duff and do something. You know, so I don't spend my whole life laying in bed thinking about how bored I am and how nothing that I do really matters to anybody anyway...

Bet I'm not the only person who needs a good kick in the butt to get up and do something useful. Wish it weren't quite so big a kick in the butt as, a bunch of people I know and like live in a village that could potentially be wiped out by hurricanes and flooding. D'oh! Well, at least there's a possible solution. Best estimate I've heard so far says that saving the village from erosion will require a wall that costs some $50,000 US dollars - well within reach for a well-organized fundraising campaign, especially since we've already got money lined up to cover about half this cost. Wanna help make the rest of it happen? Contact julianbrelsford //at'\\ gmail.com

Quaker Worship and Children

I've been thinking about the way children often can't sit still in a Quaker meeting. They're often fidgety and sometimes they like to ask, "are we almost done yet?" And adults sometimes, too, you know.

And you know how Quakers got the name, Quaker? You probably do - people would "quake" or shake, because God was telling them to get up and do something, and they just couldn't hold it in. Or God didn't want them to hold it in, at least.

We often don't even think about the possibility that fidgety young Quakers, the ones who don't sit still in Quaker Meeting, might be unable to sit still because of some kind of Quaker ministry they're called to share.

Now, I'm not saying that every fidgety kid has something to say during meeting that all of us ought to hear.

But I wonder if every fidgety kid has some kind of "ministry" that we ought to be helping them express - it could be speaking, drawing, painting, cooking, fixing stuff with wrenches and hammers...

Stillness, Rising, Falling

So I was thinking about stillness, and how stillness is one of the things we look for in Quaker meetings, partly as a retreat from our crazy world, a place where we can feel safe.

And I was thinking about the joy and excitement that I think has been felt at the birth of new religious movements, including the beginning of the Quaker faith.

I guess both of these - looking for steadiness and retreat, and the looking for excitement - are healthy.

But I think the loud-and-excited side of faith is what's often caused dramatic growth in different religious movements, like early Christians or early Quakers.

I've also been thinking about the worry some folks have, about declining numbers of people participating in unprogrammed Quaker meetings. Maybe we'd really like the numbers to be steady.

Often, though, sameness is not really something the world does. Things rise, they fall, but they don't really sit still that well. Do our meetings for worship sit still well? Do we rise and fall? Do the numbers of Quakers rise and fall?

Often we don't feel safe even saying that we might like the numbers of Quakers to rise. And religions that let excitement take over are dangerous.

I don't know. Not like the number of Quakers "on the books" matters that much anyway, but I guess I'd like to see more of us be excited about our faith, and I think that'd have an impact on how many people come to worship with us...