NO LONGER STRANGERS

#1 · May 1, 2003, 10:20 am

Quote from Forum Archives on May 1, 2003, 10:20 am
Posted by: henkf <henkf@...>

Kid's Wisdom and prayers in cartoon format

NOW also available as Greting Cards

http://folsom.sk.ca/deargod.htm

************************************************

NO LONGER STRANGERS

Ephesians 2:19

"Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God." (Ephesians 2:19 )

No longer strangers.

I have heard it said that a child is born untrusting. Perhaps that is why life begins with a cry. The infant is apart from its mother for the first time. It has become a separate human being. But also at that moment, to a certain extent, the newborn becomes a stranger.

Some of us have strangers living in our own house. We do not always understand one another. We love and treasure our children, and watch them grow, but we can never completely understand them. And our parents, seen from the perspective of the children, are always doing strange things. We love them and respect them, but we do not always understand.

A man and woman can be married to each other twenty years and yet remain strangers to each other in many respects. According to the Scriptures, two people become one flesh in marriage, but that is not altogether true of our personalities. There is a separateness that no power in this world can ever bridge. So when Paul writes that we are no more strangers, that Christ has destroyed the wall that separates us from each other and from God, when he says we are no longer strangers--that is truly a mighty affirmation!

Have you ever been alone in a crowd of people that you didn't know? Even when you don't know anyone, something in you wants to relate to someone. And this idea of relating to a stranger in a crowd has been a romantic influence throughout the centuries on literature, art, and music. The Rogers and Hammerstein song says that "Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger across a crowded room, and somehow you know, you know even then, that somehow you'll see her again and again." No longer strangers --there is suddenly that bond between you.

And Paul tells us that there can be a bond that tears down the walls, that establishes an instant relationship between us and everyone else in this world, and with God himself. No longer strangers to anyone. Isn't that good news?

Paul Tillich was the one who first made the term "estrangement" popular. He said that the tragedy of our time is man's estrangement from himself, from others, and from God.

But let us look at this concept of being strangers for a moment.

WE CAN BE STRANGERS EVEN TO OURSELVES.

We can live a lifetime and never even know ourselves, much less anybody else. Probably the most bizarre example of this was the man who thought he was dead. He was a very wealthy man, intelligent, and also well-educated. But there was just that one thing wrong with him: he thought he was dead. After some amount of tribulation, his family and friends finally prevailed upon him to talk to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist recognized that this man was intelligent and well-educated, so he tried to use reason to convince the man of his error. So he asked him, "Do dead men eat?" And the man said, "Well, as a matter of fact, maybe they do. In many cultures, in the Orient for example, they put food in the tombs so that the dead can come back and consume it. Apparently dead men do eat." Then the psychiatrist asked him, "Do dead men talk?" The man said, "Well, maybe they do. You know, Houdini, for example, had a telephone put in his coffin so he could call back from the other world, and people apparently talk through mediums. Yes, dead men do talk sometimes." Next, the doctor asked him, "Do dead men walk?" The man said, "Well, sometimes they do. There are documented cases in New England, for example, of haunted castles, where the former occupant comes back and walks through the night rattling chains. Yes, dead men do walk." In desperation, the psychiatrist finally asked, "Do dead men bleed?" And the patient said, "No, absolutely not. Dead men do not bleed." So the doctor said, "Roll up your sleeve." The man rolled up his sleeve and the doctor took a scalpel and made a small incision in the man's forearm. The blood began to roll down his arm and he put his finger on the blood and raised it to the light and looked at it and said, "Well, what do you know. Dead men do bleed."

No amount of reason in the world was going to help that man overcome the estrangement with himself. That is an unusual case, of course. But there are examples to be seen in front of each of us every day.

SOME OF US ARE ESTRANGED FROM OURSELVES BECAUSE OF A NEGATIVE SELF-EVALUATION, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS NO REALITY TO OUR EVALUATION.

Dr. Alfred Adler, the great psychologist, had an experience when he was a young boy. He got off to a bad start in arithmetic, and his teacher became convinced that Adler was stupid when it came to mathematics. The teacher told his parents that the boy was dumb, and also told them not to expect too much of him. His parents, too, were convinced of the teacher's evaluation. Therefore, Adler himself passively accepted the assessment that they had made of him. And his grades in arithmetic proved that they were correct. One day, however, he had a sudden flash of insight and thought he saw how to work a problem the teacher had put on the board, one which none of the other pupils could work. So he raised his hand and announced that he would do the problem. The students, and even the teacher, laughed at the idea. Then he became indignant. He strode to the blackboard and worked the problem, perfectly, much to everyone's amazement. At that moment he realized that he could understand arithmetic. He had been handed an unreal, negative self-evaluation, and he had believed it and performed on the basis of that assessment.

Now many of us here have done the same thing. Someone has told us that our abilities are limited, or that our dreams are unreachable, and we have accepted that evaluation without question. And ever afterwards we go through life unhappy and unfulfilled. We become estranged from ourselves simply because we believe what others have told us about ourselves.

SOME OF US ARE ESTRANGED FROM OURSELVES BECAUSE WE HAVE UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS.

This is not quite the opposite of the negative self-evaluation, but it is just as deadly.

Have you ever known anyone who was afraid to be just human? It is a miserable state to be in -- always being so afraid of making a mistake, or saying the wrong thing, that we can't function. Those of us who are this way must realize that nobody is perfect. That is an awful cliche, I know. But it is true, and we need to be reminded of it. No baseball hitter, no matter how good, ever bats a thousand. We think a hitter is remarkable if he just hits the ball three times for every ten times at bat. That's only thirty percent of the time. We tend to forget that the great Babe Ruth, who holds the record for the most home runs, also holds the record for the most strike-outs.

It's true: nobody is perfect. But sometimes we forget this and develop unrealistic expectations of ourselves. We forget that we are just flesh and blood. When this happens, people think that we are stuck-up, that we are snobs -- they don't know that we are simply afraid of making a mistake, afraid of being real. Or in the case of the man who declared that dead men do bleed, we are afraid of being alive.

Negative self-evaluation and unrealistic expectations estrange us from ourselves, and make our potential go unrealized. No wonder we feel like strangers all the time. We never completely channel all of our energies, all of our creativity, all of our imagination, all of our inner strength and power into what it could be. Because we don't know ourselves, we can never completely give ourselves to anything.

An excellent example of this lost potential can be seen when a hypnotist performs. A hypnotist can tell a mighty football player that a pencil is too heavy to lift, and that tremendous athlete will not be able, with all his energy, to lift that pencil. Has the hypnotist changed the athlete's strength? Not at all. He has simply made the athlete struggle against himself. Of course, the opposite works just as well. An athlete who might only be able to register a gripping strength of 100 pounds on a dynamometer can be hypnotized, and all of a sudden he is capable of gripping 125 pounds. Has he been given added strength by the hypnotist? No, but those blocking forces in his life that tell him that 100 pounds is his limit are suddenly torn away and he is able to perform at maximum potential.

Now, you and I -- if we were no longer strangers to ourselves, could perform at our maximum potential, as husbands and wives, as parents, as active participants in our community, and at everything we do. But we need to be the best US that God created. We must no longer be strangers to ourselves.

AS PAUL SAYS, CHRIST CAN TEAR DOWN THOSE WALLS THAT KEEP US FROM BEING WHAT GOD CREATED US TO BE.

He can help us to know ourselves, and, through that knowledge, give ourselves.

I am told that there is only one man-made structure on earth that is detectable by the human eye from orbit, and that one structure is the Great Wall of China. Somehow that seems to fit. The one structure in the entire world that is grand enough to be seen from space is a wall. If you wanted to define human nature, a wall might be a good place to start. There is a tendency in man to shut others out, there is a desire to remain aloof and separate from others' predicaments. Unfortunately for the human race, though, such separation always leads to unhappiness because we were made for community, for fellowship, for oneness. We were not created to be strangers from one another. Sometimes even in a church we can be strangers. And oh, what a great joy we miss! Do you know what the greatest thing that can happen to any church is? It's not having a successful building fund drive, or increasing membership by 25 percent in one year's time. The greatest thing that can happen in a Christian church is that it becomes a true fellowship, a community of faith, whose members are no longer strangers.

Some of you may know Ray Bradbury's science-fiction story of the astronaut who got off a space ship and saw a spider coming toward him. The monster was fifteen feet high with hairy legs and bulging eyes. The spider was smiling, but the spaceman did not notice this, just as we wouldn't. All he saw was a giant spider, and he was terrified. He took out his ray gun and killed the spider because he knew that spiders captured prey and ate them, and that he was just the right size. Unfortunately, this spider, in good science-fiction style, was part of a race that was far more intelligent than human beings. And, as a result of one of them being killed by an earthman, hundreds of thousands of them came and destroyed human civilization. Now, what would have happened if the astronaut had seen that the spider was smiling, instead of seeing it as a monster about to eat him, and responding out of fear?

We all make the mistake of failing to reach out to understand another. We tend to forget Edwin Markham's words:

"There is a destiny that makes us brothers.

None goes his way alone.

All that we send into the lives of others,

Comes back into our own."

I do recognize that some of us have a need for privacy. There are some of you who would say to me, "The greatest thing I cherish is my privacy." We can understand that. Everybody needs to be alone at some point or another. Even Jesus needed privacy. There are those places in the Scripture where He says, "Come ye apart," and the disciples go to a lonely place with the Master. But we should also realize that, throughout the Gospels, Jesus never shut anybody out, either. No one was a stranger -- the demoniac, the Samaritan woman, the wretched woman with the issue of blood, or the leper. There were no strangers in Jesus' world, and by his help there need be no strangers in our world. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could give that gift to the next generation? Have you ever noticed what happens when someone goes into a group of people that they've never met before? They feel so uncomfortable, and so alone, that it's hard to reach out and communicate with them. Now wouldn't it be great to be able to give those people the gift of not seeing the others as strangers? Wouldn't it be great if we all had that gift?

Christ can do that. Christ can give us that gift. He can help us see other people as human beings, and not as strangers. We are not perfect, but neither is anyone else. We are not beyond redemption, but neither is anyone else. We are estranged from ourselves, and we are estranged from others. But, of course,

THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF OUR LIVES IS WHEN WE ARE STRANGERS WITH GOD.

J. B. Martin, in his early years of writing, found it necessary to be gone from home for long periods of time doing research for his articles. When his children were small, they memorized his face from a picture so that they would recognize him when he came home. That is somewhat like our relationship with God, isn't it? Our picture of God is Jesus Christ. And I'm not speaking of the pictures of Jesus that we see on the wall, I mean the picture of His life that is painted in the New Testament. We do not have to be estranged from God, we have seen God in Jesus!

A certain woman traveled to Israel in her later years, determined to learn the Hebrew language before she died. She said that she wanted to be able to greet the Creator in His native tongue.

But that woman should have known, as you should know, that we do not have to go to Israel, or learn another language, in order to know Christ. God doesn't speak Aramaic. God doesn't speak Hebrew. He speaks the language of the Spirit that we can all understand. We are not strangers.

Marco Polo, after his visit to the Persian village from where the three Wise Men had allegedly come, brought back with him the legend of how each of the Wise Men had found his own Christ in Bethlehem. The youngest wise man found a young Christ, the one in his middle years found a mature Christ, and the oldest found a Companion for his old age. Now this old legend contains a profound truth: it suggests that whenever we discover Christ, we discover our own selves, gaining for the first time a full, honest view, both of what we have been and what we can become. In Jesus Christ we meet both God and man.

That incarnation, that divinity, is very difficult for us to understand. We just can't comprehend that two-fold nature: both man and God. But He helps us bridge the gap, helps us come closer to an understanding. He tears down the wall of separateness so that we are no longer strangers.

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Posted by: henkf <henkf@...>

Kid's Wisdom and prayers in cartoon format
NOW also available as Greting Cards
http://folsom.sk.ca/deargod.htm

************************************************

NO LONGER STRANGERS

Ephesians 2:19

"Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God." (Ephesians 2:19 )

No longer strangers.

I have heard it said that a child is born untrusting. Perhaps that is why life begins with a cry. The infant is apart from its mother for the first time. It has become a separate human being. But also at that moment, to a certain extent, the newborn becomes a stranger.

Some of us have strangers living in our own house. We do not always understand one another. We love and treasure our children, and watch them grow, but we can never completely understand them. And our parents, seen from the perspective of the children, are always doing strange things. We love them and respect them, but we do not always understand.

A man and woman can be married to each other twenty years and yet remain strangers to each other in many respects. According to the Scriptures, two people become one flesh in marriage, but that is not altogether true of our personalities. There is a separateness that no power in this world can ever bridge. So when Paul writes that we are no more strangers, that Christ has destroyed the wall that separates us from each other and from God, when he says we are no longer strangers--that is truly a mighty affirmation!

Have you ever been alone in a crowd of people that you didn't know? Even when you don't know anyone, something in you wants to relate to someone. And this idea of relating to a stranger in a crowd has been a romantic influence throughout the centuries on literature, art, and music. The Rogers and Hammerstein song says that "Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger across a crowded room, and somehow you know, you know even then, that somehow you'll see her again and again." No longer strangers --there is suddenly that bond between you.

And Paul tells us that there can be a bond that tears down the walls, that establishes an instant relationship between us and everyone else in this world, and with God himself. No longer strangers to anyone. Isn't that good news?

Paul Tillich was the one who first made the term "estrangement" popular. He said that the tragedy of our time is man's estrangement from himself, from others, and from God.

But let us look at this concept of being strangers for a moment.

WE CAN BE STRANGERS EVEN TO OURSELVES.

We can live a lifetime and never even know ourselves, much less anybody else. Probably the most bizarre example of this was the man who thought he was dead. He was a very wealthy man, intelligent, and also well-educated. But there was just that one thing wrong with him: he thought he was dead. After some amount of tribulation, his family and friends finally prevailed upon him to talk to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist recognized that this man was intelligent and well-educated, so he tried to use reason to convince the man of his error. So he asked him, "Do dead men eat?" And the man said, "Well, as a matter of fact, maybe they do. In many cultures, in the Orient for example, they put food in the tombs so that the dead can come back and consume it. Apparently dead men do eat." Then the psychiatrist asked him, "Do dead men talk?" The man said, "Well, maybe they do. You know, Houdini, for example, had a telephone put in his coffin so he could call back from the other world, and people apparently talk through mediums. Yes, dead men do talk sometimes." Next, the doctor asked him, "Do dead men walk?" The man said, "Well, sometimes they do. There are documented cases in New England, for example, of haunted castles, where the former occupant comes back and walks through the night rattling chains. Yes, dead men do walk." In desperation, the psychiatrist finally asked, "Do dead men bleed?" And the patient said, "No, absolutely not. Dead men do not bleed." So the doctor said, "Roll up your sleeve." The man rolled up his sleeve and the doctor took a scalpel and made a small incision in the man's forearm. The blood began to roll down his arm and he put his finger on the blood and raised it to the light and looked at it and said, "Well, what do you know. Dead men do bleed."

No amount of reason in the world was going to help that man overcome the estrangement with himself. That is an unusual case, of course. But there are examples to be seen in front of each of us every day.

SOME OF US ARE ESTRANGED FROM OURSELVES BECAUSE OF A NEGATIVE SELF-EVALUATION, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS NO REALITY TO OUR EVALUATION.

Dr. Alfred Adler, the great psychologist, had an experience when he was a young boy. He got off to a bad start in arithmetic, and his teacher became convinced that Adler was stupid when it came to mathematics. The teacher told his parents that the boy was dumb, and also told them not to expect too much of him. His parents, too, were convinced of the teacher's evaluation. Therefore, Adler himself passively accepted the assessment that they had made of him. And his grades in arithmetic proved that they were correct. One day, however, he had a sudden flash of insight and thought he saw how to work a problem the teacher had put on the board, one which none of the other pupils could work. So he raised his hand and announced that he would do the problem. The students, and even the teacher, laughed at the idea. Then he became indignant. He strode to the blackboard and worked the problem, perfectly, much to everyone's amazement. At that moment he realized that he could understand arithmetic. He had been handed an unreal, negative self-evaluation, and he had believed it and performed on the basis of that assessment.

Now many of us here have done the same thing. Someone has told us that our abilities are limited, or that our dreams are unreachable, and we have accepted that evaluation without question. And ever afterwards we go through life unhappy and unfulfilled. We become estranged from ourselves simply because we believe what others have told us about ourselves.

SOME OF US ARE ESTRANGED FROM OURSELVES BECAUSE WE HAVE UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS.

This is not quite the opposite of the negative self-evaluation, but it is just as deadly.

Have you ever known anyone who was afraid to be just human? It is a miserable state to be in -- always being so afraid of making a mistake, or saying the wrong thing, that we can't function. Those of us who are this way must realize that nobody is perfect. That is an awful cliche, I know. But it is true, and we need to be reminded of it. No baseball hitter, no matter how good, ever bats a thousand. We think a hitter is remarkable if he just hits the ball three times for every ten times at bat. That's only thirty percent of the time. We tend to forget that the great Babe Ruth, who holds the record for the most home runs, also holds the record for the most strike-outs.

It's true: nobody is perfect. But sometimes we forget this and develop unrealistic expectations of ourselves. We forget that we are just flesh and blood. When this happens, people think that we are stuck-up, that we are snobs -- they don't know that we are simply afraid of making a mistake, afraid of being real. Or in the case of the man who declared that dead men do bleed, we are afraid of being alive.

Negative self-evaluation and unrealistic expectations estrange us from ourselves, and make our potential go unrealized. No wonder we feel like strangers all the time. We never completely channel all of our energies, all of our creativity, all of our imagination, all of our inner strength and power into what it could be. Because we don't know ourselves, we can never completely give ourselves to anything.

An excellent example of this lost potential can be seen when a hypnotist performs. A hypnotist can tell a mighty football player that a pencil is too heavy to lift, and that tremendous athlete will not be able, with all his energy, to lift that pencil. Has the hypnotist changed the athlete's strength? Not at all. He has simply made the athlete struggle against himself. Of course, the opposite works just as well. An athlete who might only be able to register a gripping strength of 100 pounds on a dynamometer can be hypnotized, and all of a sudden he is capable of gripping 125 pounds. Has he been given added strength by the hypnotist? No, but those blocking forces in his life that tell him that 100 pounds is his limit are suddenly torn away and he is able to perform at maximum potential.

Now, you and I -- if we were no longer strangers to ourselves, could perform at our maximum potential, as husbands and wives, as parents, as active participants in our community, and at everything we do. But we need to be the best US that God created. We must no longer be strangers to ourselves.

AS PAUL SAYS, CHRIST CAN TEAR DOWN THOSE WALLS THAT KEEP US FROM BEING WHAT GOD CREATED US TO BE.

He can help us to know ourselves, and, through that knowledge, give ourselves.

I am told that there is only one man-made structure on earth that is detectable by the human eye from orbit, and that one structure is the Great Wall of China. Somehow that seems to fit. The one structure in the entire world that is grand enough to be seen from space is a wall. If you wanted to define human nature, a wall might be a good place to start. There is a tendency in man to shut others out, there is a desire to remain aloof and separate from others' predicaments. Unfortunately for the human race, though, such separation always leads to unhappiness because we were made for community, for fellowship, for oneness. We were not created to be strangers from one another. Sometimes even in a church we can be strangers. And oh, what a great joy we miss! Do you know what the greatest thing that can happen to any church is? It's not having a successful building fund drive, or increasing membership by 25 percent in one year's time. The greatest thing that can happen in a Christian church is that it becomes a true fellowship, a community of faith, whose members are no longer strangers.

Some of you may know Ray Bradbury's science-fiction story of the astronaut who got off a space ship and saw a spider coming toward him. The monster was fifteen feet high with hairy legs and bulging eyes. The spider was smiling, but the spaceman did not notice this, just as we wouldn't. All he saw was a giant spider, and he was terrified. He took out his ray gun and killed the spider because he knew that spiders captured prey and ate them, and that he was just the right size. Unfortunately, this spider, in good science-fiction style, was part of a race that was far more intelligent than human beings. And, as a result of one of them being killed by an earthman, hundreds of thousands of them came and destroyed human civilization. Now, what would have happened if the astronaut had seen that the spider was smiling, instead of seeing it as a monster about to eat him, and responding out of fear?

We all make the mistake of failing to reach out to understand another. We tend to forget Edwin Markham's words:

"There is a destiny that makes us brothers.

None goes his way alone.

All that we send into the lives of others,

Comes back into our own."

I do recognize that some of us have a need for privacy. There are some of you who would say to me, "The greatest thing I cherish is my privacy." We can understand that. Everybody needs to be alone at some point or another. Even Jesus needed privacy. There are those places in the Scripture where He says, "Come ye apart," and the disciples go to a lonely place with the Master. But we should also realize that, throughout the Gospels, Jesus never shut anybody out, either. No one was a stranger -- the demoniac, the Samaritan woman, the wretched woman with the issue of blood, or the leper. There were no strangers in Jesus' world, and by his help there need be no strangers in our world. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could give that gift to the next generation? Have you ever noticed what happens when someone goes into a group of people that they've never met before? They feel so uncomfortable, and so alone, that it's hard to reach out and communicate with them. Now wouldn't it be great to be able to give those people the gift of not seeing the others as strangers? Wouldn't it be great if we all had that gift?

Christ can do that. Christ can give us that gift. He can help us see other people as human beings, and not as strangers. We are not perfect, but neither is anyone else. We are not beyond redemption, but neither is anyone else. We are estranged from ourselves, and we are estranged from others. But, of course,

THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF OUR LIVES IS WHEN WE ARE STRANGERS WITH GOD.

J. B. Martin, in his early years of writing, found it necessary to be gone from home for long periods of time doing research for his articles. When his children were small, they memorized his face from a picture so that they would recognize him when he came home. That is somewhat like our relationship with God, isn't it? Our picture of God is Jesus Christ. And I'm not speaking of the pictures of Jesus that we see on the wall, I mean the picture of His life that is painted in the New Testament. We do not have to be estranged from God, we have seen God in Jesus!

A certain woman traveled to Israel in her later years, determined to learn the Hebrew language before she died. She said that she wanted to be able to greet the Creator in His native tongue.

But that woman should have known, as you should know, that we do not have to go to Israel, or learn another language, in order to know Christ. God doesn't speak Aramaic. God doesn't speak Hebrew. He speaks the language of the Spirit that we can all understand. We are not strangers.

Marco Polo, after his visit to the Persian village from where the three Wise Men had allegedly come, brought back with him the legend of how each of the Wise Men had found his own Christ in Bethlehem. The youngest wise man found a young Christ, the one in his middle years found a mature Christ, and the oldest found a Companion for his old age. Now this old legend contains a profound truth: it suggests that whenever we discover Christ, we discover our own selves, gaining for the first time a full, honest view, both of what we have been and what we can become. In Jesus Christ we meet both God and man.

That incarnation, that divinity, is very difficult for us to understand. We just can't comprehend that two-fold nature: both man and God. But He helps us bridge the gap, helps us come closer to an understanding. He tears down the wall of separateness so that we are no longer strangers.

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