By Kat Silverglate, Copyright 2020
| We interrupt our normal programming to bring you a Mobile Mission Report, rather than a new mission this month. This report involves a mission we did at the start of summer – Reach Across a Divide. If you didn’t participate in that one, you are so welcome to visit our June 2020 link so that this report will have even more context. We’ve done our best to write it in such a way that it can stand alone if you don’t have time to visit both. Here’s the story: |
When we look back on 2020, certainly the words “Covid” “George Floyd” “Election” “Red/Blue” “Wild Fires” and “Division” will be part and parcel of our package of phrases. Here at the Ridiculous Hour Foundation, we’ll also have a phrase that will forever be part of our 2020 story – “Disrupting Division.” God keeps showing up and interrupting our lives. He keeps showing up in the midst of all this division. He keeps disrupting it as only He can do.
We didn’t coin this phrase. Actually it came to us the way most of these missions come, ridiculously and seemingly out of left field. Clearing out my childhood home after my mom died, a friend of mine in Jacksonville, Florida came over to give me and my sisters some encouragement. She’s good at that. We really needed it. That kind of closure is just wretchedly hard – like much of the rest of 2020 has been.
As she was leaving, she saw the supplies for the June Monthly Mission Pack splayed out on a bed in one of the half-emptied rooms. The comforter was covered with hundreds of individually wrapped packets of coffee and tea, gift card holders and small business cards that read – “Got time for a cup of coffee or tea? I just want to spend some time listening.”
“What’s all this?” she asked as she picked up one of the colorful gift card holders.
“Oh, that’s gonna be the prop for our June Monthly Mobile Mission Pack. It’s called Reaching Across a Divide. We’re trying to inspire and equip people to reach across all this division.” And then I picked up a gift card holder and showed her how the coffee and tea and invite card fit inside. And then explained how we’d use a story about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to inspire people and challenge them to pray over it and think about giving the prop away to whomever the Lord prompted them to reach. “It’s all about building bridges where divide separates us.”
Her eyes filled with water.
“That’s what we’ll be talking about in November at out ‘Project Common Grounds’ event.”
Carol’s church hosts local conversations on difficult topics in order to help participants find common ground through civil conversation. They pick hard subjects and they bring people from the community together and facilitate an honest discussion. November was already scheduled to involve a panel discussion with pastors and civic leaders and a man who speaks around the country about the Church’s call to sit at the edge of division in the world and still find a way to show Christ’s love. The challenge was to think about how serving others together brought the differences between us into check.
“Do you think we can talk about the possibility of somehow including this activity in our November event?” she asked.
Now my eyes were watering. “Of course we can.”
So, we counted our supplies after sending out the June Monthly Mission Pack to our regular participants, and we still had enough to create 275 new packs with our signature props and a summary of what we did in June to inspire the disruption of division. Those packs were distributed to the attendees and their organizations as an inspiration to begin living out the message they had heard at the November event – let’s disrupt all this division by finding common ground in the way we serve our community.
One of the panelists spoke about a letter a church father wrote a few hundred years after Christ died. It was written during a very turbulent time. A time of great division and persecution. The ancient religious leader said something like this in his letter to the governing authorities. I’m paraphrasing from memory here and trying to give the tone he gave so eloquently in his talk. He said something like this:
Are you sure it’s really a good idea to be persecuting a group of people who are feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and caring for the sick?
The panelist, a pastor, expressed sadness over the fact that division in the church would make that letter pretty difficult to write in 2020. It was convicting. And a call to action to find common ground where we can serve together. Where we can be like Christ in the hurting world. Feeding the poor. Clothing the naked. Caring for the sick.
We don’t know what God is gonna do with those mission packs. But we do know this. Disrupting division is at the very heart of God’s call to us personally. He sent his only Son to bridge the divide. And that is just ridiculous, in the most amazing way.
We hope you enjoyed this report and we look forward to connecting with you again in September as we resume our mission to inspire lives ridiculously responsive to the promptings of God.
If you’d like to receive a copy of our next Mission Pack in your mailbox with all the creative props we are inspired to send, write us a message on our contact link at theridiculoushour.com. We’ll get one out to you.
And if you just aren’t quite sure where to start with God, no worries. He started with you a long time ago. He’ll never stop knocking. The question for each and every one of us is this -- will we respond?
That’s the mission, inspiring ridiculously responsive lives. Responsive to the promptings of God.
