Blessing of Another Viewpoint
Hello, and welcome to another blessing Sunday. Traveling with me on this path are
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who shared the idea with me.
The picture at the top of the post is of my nearly 10-year-old neutered male kitty we call Sunny. It fits his personality to a tee. He might be blind, but he always seems curious about someone new. And he’s such a shepherd when one of us gets sick!
He asked me to pick him up the other day. He does that by standing on his hind legs and putting his forepaws on my knees. He’s not a real touchy-feely kitty, but occasionally he likes it, and this was 1 of those occasions.
As I was holding him, I got to thinking about how different our worldviews were. He comes up to my ankles, so mostly what he sees, if anything, is down low. He uses whiskers for navigation. I know he can conceptualize things like his food and treats, but how he does that without language is beyond me. But as he lays in my lap purring his rumbling symphony and kneading my knee with his claws, and I massage his back, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt our feelings run very deep for one another.
How can it be, I wonder, that two beings with such widely divergent world views can love one another so much, and yet many humans despite far more similar ways of looking at the world can view things so differently–and worse, with so much vitriole toward those who disagree.
As we embark on this season of Lent, I think again of some of Jesus’s unanswered prayers. If I would ask most Christians about that, they’d immediately think of His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. But there is another, found in John 17:20-21.
20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
The sad truth is we as Christians are hardly one. I question whether most people who don’t share our faith can look at us and say something special’s going on. Yet we have so much more in common than we have differences. We love Jesus. We believe in Baptism, though the form differs. We believe in Jesus’s crucifixion, and most of us believe in His resurrection. And we believe one day we’ll go to Heaven–and yes–meet those with whom we disagree.
This Lenten season one of my prayers will be that we as Christians will find some of that unity and love despite such different world views, just like Sunny Kitty and me. I’m asking for God’s help with that. Maybe all of us can do so as well. We sure could use a lot more love around here.