'you are the equipment'

Few days work out quite like I might plan - and this was no exception!

I'd planned on 'preparation': that's to say, some thinking round the passage and the theme the Lord is giving for this coming Sunday's worship, and some wider reading, too.

Instead, I got people. The chance to meet a range of different people and to sit and talk with them; to listen to their stories and to talk about our dreams. As I say, not much of it was planned to be that way at all.

But it's people and relationships that count, not learning and performance on my part. I remember being struck a while ago when I read through Mark's gospel from The Message: I came to the bit where Jesus sends his twelve disciples out, each one still pretty much a rookie at this sort of thing, and says to them -

"Don't think you need a lot of extra equipment for this. You are the equipment..." (That's somewhere in Mark chapter 6 I think).

You are the equipment. I'm what he uses. Not my neatly-worded sermons nor my slickly packaged visual presentations. Just me. The person that I am. In relationship with others. Listening, sharing, talking, dreaming, laughing, praying. Me being me and Jesus somehow being there in me, through me, also doing his stuff.

You are the equipment, he says. So all the preparation went on hold. And the day was spent in largely being with people, engaging in important conversation and in building those relationships which count.

A long, and unexpected, but really fruitful conversation through a large part of the morning with a lady whose discernment of the promptings of the Lord I've long since shared. She's boldly taken steps of faith, responding to the leading of the Lord and now she rightly senses that he's still got more he wants to do: lots more. All that's happened thus far's but a start.

She's onto something central to what God is surely doing in these days. She understands that so much of the 'baggage' which the church has come to carry is just exactly that 'equipment' which the Lord says we don't need.

My nephew, David, was in over lunch - and what a fine young man he is! Well-mannered, good-humoured and always with so much to give. He gets on so well with any age of person.

The young, teenage girls in the kitchen were falling over themselves (or so it seemed, but I think he was oblivious to that!) to be the one to serve him: and all the while he's happy just to chat away with me, and with my Mum, a further generation up, and with the other local minister who was also there for lunch (who's not a further generation up from my Mum!)

David and his peers today, that growing generation understands far better than the ones that went before how crucial is the need for good relationships.

He spoke about the way that through in Glasgow, where he's studied these past years, he dresses in a T-shirt and his shorts (even through the winter months) and trots across to his local 'corner shop' with nothing on his feet.

The lifestyle of Africa where he grew up dies hard!

And that unusual, non-conformist dress-code that he has results in growing closeness to the guy who runs the store (it also seems to get him regular discount!).

You are the equipment. Just being 'you'. Which is all that David's being when he goes across the road. And which was all that Jesus was. Not conforming to all that others wanted him to be: but simply being himself.

I was chatting at night to a couple who've been sharing in our worship on a Sunday these last months. And I found myself suggesting that in essence that refusal (or reluctance) to conform is very much a feature of our life. Why do things just because so many others do them and expect the same of us? We simply try to be ourselves.

We don't believe we need a lot of baggage to be the followers of Christ and heed his call. We ourselves are the equipment.

Which makes life so much simpler.