Seeing The Other View

One of the things that I often say in preaching is that God meets us where we are. I firmly believe that. It doesn't mean that God doesn't challenge us to move, but it does mean that God takes the initiative in our encounter with God. As we seek to be the church, God's people, we do well to learn from that. We need to see things from the perspective of other people. Krista Tippett cites a challenging example of this in her book "Speaking of Faith" (Penguin, 2007) when she talks about Elie Wiesel, the well-known writer who survived the terrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Visiting Berlin for the first time since the Holocaust as a guest of the German government, he asked to meet a group of young Germans - "I had never before considered," he said, "that it could be as painful to be a child of those who ran the camps as a child of those who died in them." (p. 31/32)