A finger slammed in the door

Over the holidays, our little girl got her finger shut in a door. It was an inside door in our house. The shocking part to me was that her finger got slammed in the hinge side of the door and the door shut completely. How does that happen and your finger not just come off?

So she has a pretty good gash on her finger and we run her to the ER and she actually falls asleep in the waiting room. I guess crying furiously for 45 minutes is kind of exhausting. Eventually we get in to see the doctor. The really funny part was that while the doc is stitching up the gash, I all of a sudden realize that I'M getting sick and about to pass out. The doc sits me down and puts a cold cloth on my head. My brave little girl handled her gash far better than her old man.

So i got to thinking about this later and found myself thinking of ways to try to keep this kind of thing from happening again. I found myself wanting to control her life situations so as to keep her from having this kind of accident.

But then I had that "duh" kind of realization: that was probably the best possible thing to help her learn.

Then came the really profound "AHA" moment: I realized that so much of our church life is structured to try to prevent us from having accidents. We are so careful to avoid making mistakes. We set up so many committees and task forces and teams to try to control situations and minimize "accidents."

But the result of all our good intentioned "parenting" is that we keep ourselves from stepping into the new world that is emerging around us. By trying to insulate ourselves from danger, we actually keep ourselves from experimenting with new ways of thinking, new ways of reaching out, new ways of doing church.

I wonder if we are actually preventing ourselves from growing into the full maturity of our faith. I wonder if we are keeping ourselves from growing into the future God is calling us to.

As we grow and mature, the world that we see and interact with changes. And our ability to interact with it changes. For us to grow and mature, we have to experiment with this new world. Without world, there is an ever changing world "out there" and it is a world for which the church is increasingly irrelevent. I think that may very well be because we are stuck in 1950, trying to control our every step so as to not make mistakes.

Maybe the time has come for us to step out into the world and shut our fingers in a few doors. There may not be any other way for us to learn how to interact with the world around us.