Feb 10th 2021 - Understatement

Do you recognise this little hill? - It is, of course, Mount Everest.

I was reading about understatement today - It was an idea for a church service which I decided not to use. It suggested showing various pictures and getting people to to make 'understatements' about them. So Niagara falls could be described as 'a bit damp'. 
The exercise continued with doing the reverse - show picture and get people to 'big them up' instead.

There needs to be a balance in our vision - see things as they are.

There is a verse in the book of James in the Bible that talks about looking in a mirror but then forgetting what we have seen. We need that realism about ourselves too. Some people are very self-critical others, though not so many I think are full of self-praise. The Bible encourages us to be realistic, however, that can be difficult because it tells us we are made in the very image of God, we are sons and daughters of God on one hand but also that we are fallen, we have missed the mark, missed God's best for ourselves. This picture is heavenly on one hand and hellish on the other (think about some of the evil perpetrated by humans). How do we get a realistic picture?

Alain de Botton says the sign of maturity is realising we are a mix of good and bad, success and failure. We are all screwed up to one degree or another - perhaps we can make this Lent about unscrewing things a little to let our true divine nature as children of God shine through a little more?

We will be thinking about this on our Wednesday evenings at 8pm on zoom. See here for more details

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