Prejudicial

We took a group to Brighton last week to spend some time sharing with others who Jesus is. We spent time before we went praying and asking God what it was we should be doing for the afternoon. We felt He was asking us to go and say sorry to people for how the church has hurt them over the years! So we got ourselves some cardboard to make signs on which we wrote ‘Sorry for (insert here what we feel God is saying)’.

As we asked God what to write one of the things that someone felt was that we needed to say sorry for being prejudicial. This in itself generated some discussion within our group, some of us thought that this word was a bit odd and that we should come up with a different word instead, such as sorry for judging you. After a bit of talking (and willingness to lay down our own opinions) we decided that we should just write prejudicial. After all if we say we trust God and believe that He knows more than we do, who are we to change what he says.

We were all blown away by what happened. As soon as we got out on the street 2 people approached the couple with the prejudicial sign and spent the whole of the rest of the time talking about where they had been hurt by the church and talking about whom Jesus is. The only reason that they came was because the sign said prejudicial.

For me it was a moment of God showing me that actually He does know what is He is doing.  That I would much rather do what he is asking, than filtering it through what I think would be a good way to do things. It is a constant Journey of allowing God to teach us, I want to be able to represent him well in this world and I am only going to be able to do this if I am willing to do as He is asking. It was also a moment of being able to ask myself how I am leading others, am I going to tell them what to do, or am I going to encourage them to do what they feel God is saying?

God is pretty amazing, He knows deeply who we all are and what is going on, and knows where it is we need to be met. This was just another moment where I saw God meet someone in the pain they had experienced and brought healing to it. It is an incredibly humbling thing that God brings us into this process, that he reaches out through us, and wants us to be involved in reaching out to others.