Snail Guru

If I want to succeed
To bring a man towards a certain goal
I have to start finding out where he is
And start just there

The one who cannot do that
Fools himself
When he thinks he can help others

To be able to help someone
I certainly have to know more
But first of all
I have to know what he understands

If I can’t do that
It will not help that I can and know more

If I still want to show how much I can
It is because I am vain and arrogant
And actually want to be admired of the other
Instead of helping him

All genuine helpfulness
Starts with being humble before the one I want to help
And I have to understand
That helping
Is not wanting to master
But to serve
If I can’t do that
I am incapable of helping anyone

Soren Kirkegaard

How can we move away from grabbing external “things” that we think fill us, to being a contribution from the infinite resources that are within our God-filled home? It seems too often we live our lives based on external gratification and not where it really matters, where the real stuff goes on. Where our treasure lies, there our heart lies also. If we make our home there in God, he will make his home in us. So how?

There’s a little verse that John sneakily tucks away in his first letter to the Church that paradoxically makes a huge impact: “If you claim to live in God, you must walk as Jesus did.” I guess he’s only paraphrasing Jesus when he called John to follow him. He invites us to do the same.

This, I believe, was once called discipleship, a forgotten art…or so it seems. I heard a preacher recently say that he felt discipleship was not very useful. The problem, he argued, was that it made us all into clones and really we were all made to be individuals. I can see his point, but fundamentally I disagree. We are all made in the image of God to be in the likeness of his son. I’m all about cloning Jesus – the world would be much better off for it!!

So how did Jesus walk? (On his feet? On water?) I reckon he first walked with God, then with others, and then with a mission. One seems to follow on from the other, and yet you can never fully separate them out. Having said that, are we guilty of all too often making the mistake of expecting those who profess a faith in Jesus and his teachings to run before they walk? Jesus spent thirty years learning to walk with God before gathering his followers (although some of this was for cultural reasons), and even then he spent three and a bit years teaching them stuff before he gave them their own mission: “Go make disciples!”

Oh, yeah, it’s easy to forget the bit after that…“teaching them all I’ve taught you.” As followers of Jesus today, is the emphasis on making disciples or being one? Being one involves walking as Jesus did. So first we must learn to walk with God. Then, and only then, will we begin to call others to walk with us.

It’s a funny thing that most people, when they reach a certain age, have a tendency to settle down and make a home somewhere. Among my friends, this tendency has taken a variety of forms ranging from an authentic native American tee-pee to a huge luxurious mansion, a slick city apartment to a quaint country cottage. One thing that has been fairly consistent is the need to make it nice. Now we use the word “nice” in a number of contexts, but here in relation to our homes it almost universally means “appropriately stylish and comfortable according to our tastes and the opinions of those most dear to us.”

I bought into this idea once, but for various reasons had to abandon it after a year or so. Since then I’ve been fairly nomadic and there’s little you can do to make your suitcase nice. This got me thinking a little, albeit somewhat abstractly: if God were to live on earth, where would he choose to make his home and what would he do to make it nice?

Well, for those of us familiar and in agreement with Christianity, God did actually once live on earth. He was born in a stable, moved about a bit as a child, then settled in a town called Galilee, only to leave it when he was about thirty and travel round without a home of any description, staying wherever he could find a place to lay his head. I’m not sure he even had a suitcase. This he did for three years before being killed and going back to live in heaven, which by all accounts is supposed to be very nice indeed. Seems to me therefore that while on earth God didn’t rate having a nice home very highly in the grand scheme of things (although he was handy as a carpenter, which casts a little doubt on such an opinion).

Furthermore, this man, Jesus, once mentioned that God, should he wish to stay on earth, wanted to make his home in us and would do so if we followed him. Following him wasn’t easy, he said. It meant not having a home we could call our own, forgetting about even the most important family matters if need be, and making one or two changes that should we decide later we’d rather go back on, would be frowned upon to say the least. One of these changes was to store up treasures in heavenly homes rather than in our earthly ones.

All in all, it seems like God wants us to live in our heavenly homes (which coincides nicely with where he lives) and concentrate on making them nice, rather than our earthly ones. What I’m getting at here is all to do with being nice people by allowing God to live in us.

The problem we have is that most people stop here, “Sure, God, come and live in me,” but then act very rudely and don’t clean up the mess or just allow God into one or two rooms, not the whole place. God, I think, expects us to be a little more hospitable than that.

And so this is the reason for the Snail Guru – to explore the wisdom of living at home with God and to make that home nice. After all, that’s how he made us.