Tagged: Yeshua
The language of love, or division? Or something completely different.
Signpost for Sunday (Pentecost) 19 May 2024: Acts 2:1-21 or Ezek 37:1-14; Ps 104:25-35,36b; Rom 8:22-27 or Acts 2:1-21.
I think I may have got Pentecost wrong for years. I still don’t like the fact that it’s associated by people in some churches with ‘speaking in tongues’. I think that makes the idea that if you don’t speak in tongues or don’t want to speak in tongues or have tried but just can’t speak in tongues, then you’re some kind of second-class Christian. I don’t think that kind of thinking has anything whatsoever to do with Pentecost. For one thing Pentecost is a story about the disciples speaking in a variety of specific languages (Acts 2:7-12). It has nothing to do with glossolalia. For another, I believe that Yeshua/Jesus wouldn’t have had anything to do with making anyone who followed him feel second class.
Having said all of that more than once in a Signpost, I was reading through all the Signposts that have been written about Pentecost this week and I realised that maybe Pentecost’s importance is less a story about something that may or may or may not have happened. Maybe Pentecost is celebrated in Christian churches because it’s a story that is important to ‘church history’ rather than personal faith.
Much missed Andrew Brown (the only ordained priest among we latter day Signpost writers) put it best in 2015. The last sentence of what he wrote then struck me for the first time this week:
“The picture that I have in my mind of the early Church is of earnest students of the word. By the word I mean the scriptures that we call the Old Testament. By early I do not mean the years immediately after the crucifixion, but those times when things were beginning to be written down. There is a gap here because the first generation mostly believed that the times were so short that there was no point in writing things down. Then Paul and others began writing letters; and experience of being scattered throughout the Roman world meant that some gathered up sayings of Jesus and other little lists. And being driven out of Jerusalem by the Roman invasion and destruction was the last straw.
So they looked back on what they could remember, and they also looked back on the scriptures; and they interpreted their memory of events to fit their understanding of the sacred writings, sometimes regarding them as predictions about their own times.
For them the later portions of Isaiah were there in order to make sense of the Cross. Ezekiel’s skeletons were there to show how the dead church after the shock of Jesus’ death could come alive and spread to the whole Roman world.
Pentecost celebrates the way the Church burst into life out of despair, and the way that the indwelling Spirit gives the gift or first fruits of the Spirit to the believers and transforms them.”
You can read Andrew’s 2015 Signpost here.
Paul
Crazy Little Thing Called Love (apologies to Queen).
Signpost for Sunday 5 May 2024: Acts 10:44-48; Ps 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17.
The well-known words ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:7) were written long after Yeshua was murdered (around 100 AD/CE), but what are conveyed as Yeshua’s own words about love are equally memorable. All of this week’s readings from the lectionary make it clear that love is central to how Yeshua tried to teach people to their lives on earth.
This is my commandment that you to love one another as I have loved you. (John 15:12)
That verse makes me ask, how did Yeshua love? Maybe we should trawl the New Testament and write down all the examples we can find. I think that’s quite a good idea. But for now I am pretty sure that the one thing at the root of the how we see Yeshua loving is compassion.
It’s compassion that separates Yeshua’s use of the word love from any romantic notions of the word. While compassion begins, like romantic love, with deep feelings, it doesn’t end there:
Compassion (noun.) a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others and a wish to help them(Cambridge Dictionary).
Compassion (noun.) sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it (Meriam=Webster).
Compassion (n.) Pity, inclining one to show mercy or give aid (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary)
Compassion (n.) Feeling or emotion when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by a desire to relieve it (The Oxford English Dictionary).
I was at a talk given by the Reverend Mark Beale (vicar of St Elizabeth’s Anglican Church in Clendon, South Auckland at the time) and I have never forgotten the first words he spoke on that day. He said, “Love is not a feeling, it’s a way of behaving.” The dictionaries think it’s both, but I got Mark’s point.
Interestingly, those dictionary definitions actually contain some suggestions on how we might go about ‘behaving love’: Help, alleviate, show mercy, give aid.
Paul
On storytelling and story tellers.
Signpost for Sunday 21 April 2024: Acts 4:5-12; Ps 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18.
Lots of my friends, and my daughter, keep telling me how good Slow Horses on Apple TV is. It stars Gary Oldman as the main character, Jackson Lamb. Despite the fact that he is one of my favourite actors, I don’t want to watch it. When we read any story we form an image of who the people are in our heads.
I read the books first and I don’t want the pictures I created in my head of him and all the other people in the stories to be affected, or even overtaken, by watching TV versions. In my experience it has always proven true that if I see the film first, I prefer it to the book and if I read the book first I prefer it to the film.
The most dramatic version of that for me was One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and that was the opposite of what I fear about Slow Horses. I saw the film of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest on a wet night in Sutton Coldfield, UK and was blown away. The thing I remember most is that the character called The Indian is presumed to be dumb, and at a very dramatic moment turns out to be able to speak after all. I loved that reveal. In the book much of the story is told from The Indian’s point of view and you know from the beginning that he is pretending to be dumb. Ruined the book for me.
All of which made me think about this week’s reading from John. Here we have Yeshua speaking; this is the character Yeshua in the book written by the author(s) of John.
I love this good shepherd, Yeshua bin Yosef. He says I am one of his sheep. Even though I am not of that original Jewish fold he is talking to. He says there shall be one flock (John 10:16) which comprises ‘the chosen people’ and everyone else.
But he also says there shall be only one shepherd (John 10:17) and that’s one of those verses that have been used by fundamentalists to create problems for hundreds of years. ‘Ecumenical’ is a word that does not exist for such people. Likewise ‘multifaith’. I think those fundamentalists are creating their own version of the character Yeshua, and it’s not the one I imagine when I read John’s book or any of the books in the New Testament.
That’s why, as I have said before, I like Marilynne Robinson’s description of the New Testament as “a story written down in various forms by writers whose purpose was first of all to render the sense of a man of surpassing holiness, whose passage through the world was only understood after his death, to have revealed the way of God to humankind.”
Paul
Thomas, twins, and rabbit holes.
Signpost for Sunday 7 April 2024 (Low Sunday): Acts 4:32-35; Ps 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31.
This week it’s the well-known doubting Thomas story. Only the author(s) of John’s gospel tell this story but it has still become one of the most famous stories in the whole New Testament. What do you think when you read or hear it? Do you think, as I do, that, like Thomas, you would not have believed that someone who you knew was dead was somehow still alive? Do you think that the point of the story is that we should believe even though we have not experienced the risen Christ for ourselves (John 20:39)?
After writing quite a few Signposts about Thomas and reading what other Signposters think, these are the main things that strike me about the Doubting Thomas story:
- Thomas is no different from any of the other disciples; they had all been shown Jesus’s nailed hands and his wounded side to convince them that resurrected Jesus was indeed the same person who was crucified. (John 20:19-20)
- Jesus doesn’t want to leave anyone out, that’s why he came back to show Thomas his wounds and allow him to not only see them but also touch them (yeeew, as my daughters might say)
- Thomas encourages us to examine what each of us really believes, and that there’s nothing wrong with doubting things we are told by others, including whatever church we may or may not belong to. One of my favourite quotes about this comes from Francis Bacon, the 16thcentury philosopher, statesman and devout Anglican, who wrote in his essay, The Advancement of Learning: If you begin in certainty, you will end in doubt. If you begin in doubt, you will end in certainty.
Last year I mentioned that Thomas was also known as Didymus (John 20:24). ‘Didymus’ is the Greek word for twin. Interestingly, ‘Thomas’ is the Hebrew word for twin. I had never before asked myself who was his twin? Was he an identical twin? Did he have a twin brother or a twin sister?
Wikipedia says his “actual name was Judah (Jude) and he was mentioned along with the other brothers of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark 6:1. It is believed he was dubbed the “twin” due to his resemblance to his brother Jesus.” (Wikipedia gets the Gospel reference wrong. I think it should be Mark 6:3.)
If that surprises you how about this from Dr. Bart Erhman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who writes: “there were some early Christians who thought that one of Jesus’ brothers, Jude (or Judas: both are translations of the same Greek word), was actually a twin. Not just of anyone, but of Jesus himself.”
If that’s true, those early Christians can’t have thought there ever was a virgin birth or that Yeshua was God’s only son.
And what about the tradition that suggests Thomas travelled to India spreading the word?
Well, there is a church of St Thomas in India today. Saint Thomas Christians there wholeheartedly believe: ‘The true teachings of Jesus have survived only in India. Thomas Christians trace their origins to the arrival of St. Thomas at Malankara, on a lagoon near present-day Kodungallur (Cranganore; near ancient Muziris) in 52 CE and to congregations he established in seven villages.’
Oh look, we’ve just gone down a rabbit hole. Let’s climb out quickly, but let’s not be afraid to carry on doubting until we find our lord and our god for ourselves.
Paul
This week’s cross word.
Signpost for Sunday 24 March 2024 (6th Sunday in Lent – Palm Sunday): Mark 11:1-11 or John 12:12-16; Ps 118:1-2,19-29.
Twenty years ago Sheila wrote a Signpost about Palm Sunday that ended with some very practical advice: “Make your palm crosses out of palms! We used flax last year, and it’s sooooo difficult to turn into ashes.”*
Sheila’s advice always springs to mind at this time of year. This year it made me Google where churches in the UK get their crosses from. Because palms aren’t abundant in the UK, are they? According to Google most palm crosses that will be used in UK churches this weekend are imported from India, Africa or Spain. And they are already made into crosses. They buy them in packs of 50 like this:
Nothing wrong with that at all of course. It’s just that it made me think of the many small groups of people all over Aotearoa New Zealand who have got together this week to sit and weave crosses for this Sunday.
My guess is that a lot of people who turn up to a church service in many countries this week won’t give a second thought to where the crosses come from or who made them. And what happens to the crosses after the service? My wife would always take more than one cross. She would give a palm cross to whichever of our children hadn’t been with us on Palm Sunday. Latterly it was both of them. We tended to pin them to a notice board, or use them as bookmarks. They hung around for at least a year and I still come across books with palm cross bookmarks in them now.
I have written a number of Signposts about Palm Sunday over the years in an effort to understand what may have happened on that Sunday in around 30AD/CE, and it’s clear that no one was holding a palm cross on that day. But that doesn’t devalue the crosses handed out on Palm Sunday .
This year I realised though that there is one difference between reading or hearing the story of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and holding a palm leaf cross in your hand on Sunday.
I think the poignancy of holding a palm cross in your hand is that those people (however many or few they may have been) that stood by the side of the road as Yeshua entered Jerusalem riding a donkey or a young horse didn’t know how the story would develop. Palm crosses literally weave together the joy of Yeshua’s arrival with the shock of his crucifixion.
Paul
* Many churches collect and burn the palm crosses to make the ash used in next year’s Ash Wednesday service.
‘Swifties’ and Greeks have difficulty getting backstage.
Signpost for Sunday 17 March 2024 (5th Sunday in Lent): Jer 31:31-34; Ps 51:1-12 or Ps 119:9-16; Heb 5:5-10; John 12:20-33.
They reckon more than 280,000 people went to see Taylor Swift in Melbourne recently. Which made me wonder how many of them managed to get ‘back stage passes’ and got to meet her in person, if any. And I wonder what those few were expecting her to say to them if they did get to meet her.
Interestingly, Taylor Swift has been known to do more than perform songs for her fans. Last year during her show in Minneapolis on June 24 she is reported to have taken a moment to encourage her fans to act with “kindness and gentleness” online.
In this week’s gospel reading ‘some Greeks’ attempt to get a backstage pass to see Yeshua by telling Philip they wish to see him John 12:21). Philip tells Andrew and they both go to tell Yeshua that some of his fans want to meet him.
Of course the author of John’s gospel doesn’t put it quite that way, but did Yeshua see it that way? After all, earlier in the chapter we are told that the crowd who met him arriving in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday had heard he was coming (John 12:12). And just before that another great crowd had turned up in Bethany not only on account of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead (John 12:9).
It seems quite possible all this sensational stuff is what had attracted a lot of the people who crowded around him in Jerusalem. Could that be an explanation for why as soon as Andrew and Philip have told him that a bunch of Greeks want to meet him Yeshua launches into one of his big speeches:
Andrew went with Philip and they told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if any one serves me, the Father will honour him.” (John 12:22-26)
We might have expected Yeshua to tell the visiting Greeks to treat their neighbours with “kindness and gentleness” too, but no. We can’t even be sure whether he’s is talking to the Greeks or just to the messengers, Andrew and Philip.
Either way, does Yeshua (and the author of John’s gospel) choose this moment to shift the focus away from the purely sensational (Lazarus and other miracles)? From a narrative perspective it makes sense to do that now because we’re coming to the most dramatic events in the story. And that’s what the author of John wants his readers and listeners to focus on.
I suspect those readers and listeners also need to be reassured. They were mostly Jewish Christians who had recently been banned from the synagogues, and were likely to be estranged from people and places they had grown up with. They had quite literally given up their old life in this world. John 12:25-26 reassured them that not only had they had done the right thing, but the Father would honour them.
Paul
Grumpy Jesus.
Signpost for Sunday 3 March 2024 (3rd Sunday in Lent): Exodus 20:1-17; Ps 19; 1 Cor 1:18-25; John 2:13-22.
John 1 is all about John the Baptist announcing who Jesus/Yeshua is/was. But the reading this week is from John 2 and only two things happen in that chapter: Mary takes her son to a wedding and asks him to magic up some more wine because it’s all been drunk before the end of the celebrations. Jesus seems annoyed with Mary (because his hour has not come): “Woman, why do you involve me?” But then he goes right ahead and changes six stone water jars into jars that contain the best wine anyone at the wedding feast has ever tasted. It reminded me of this cartoon:
Next, he goes to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples and stays for a few days without doing anything that we know of.
And then! He goes to Jerusalem for the Passover, like many good first century Jews would have done. But instead of doing what everybody else is doing (exchanging their Roman coins for Temple coins and buying something to sacrifice) he loses his rag and makes an exhibition of himself.
We think we know the story well because we conflate it with the versions of Jesus/Yeshua overturning the tables in the Temple in Mark 11:15-28 and Matthew 21:12-13. But there’s a very big difference between the first two versions and John’s. It’s where it occurs in the narrative arc of the story. In Mark and Matthew Jesus/Yeshua has his hissy fit just before the authorities decide he really does need to be dealt with. In this week’s reading we see something different. John’s narrative is not history or biography, and he never intended it to be. There’s only one reason the author of John tells the story the way he does, and he tells us exactly what that is in chapter 20 verse 30: that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Interestingly, another translation of that verse is: that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.
Here’s someone writing for followers of The Way about 100 years after Jesus/Yeshua had died. Were some of those followers having doubts about the choice they had made? About the person/god they were actually being told to worship? After all, most scholars agree that John’s gospel was written mostly for Jews, and some Gentiles, who would most likely have been banished from the synagogues and may well have been thrown out of the pagan temples they used to worship at.
If that is the case, then the author of John is keen to show his readers/listeners from the beginning that Jesus/Yeshua challenges all the norms, and that they shouldn’t despair that they have chosen a path that most of first century society doesn’t either conform to or really understand.
From a literary perspective, this Jesus/Yeshua is a very interesting character indeed. He can be grumpy and has a bit of a temper. Not the Jesus/Yeshua we normally think of perhaps. On the other hand, very, very human.
Paul
Old age and an age old question.
Signpost for Sunday 25 February 2024 (2nd Sunday in Lent): Gen 17:1-7,15-16; Ps 22:23-31; Rom 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38 or Mark 9:2-9.
There seems to be quite a lot about faith in this week’s choice of readings prescribed in the Lectionary.
In Romans 4:16 Paul says that Abraham is the father of us all. (He doesn’t say that Adam is. Although later he speaks of Adam as the first man. Obviously he didn’t know about DNA.) Is Abraham the spiritual father of us all then? That could be true if we took his faith as the beginning of faith.
Then in Romans 4:18-25 we discover that Paul’s version of Abraham’s faith isn’t quite accurate. Abram and Sarai both gave up on YHWH’s promise and that’s why Abram slept with Haggai their servant and fathered Ishmael. Given that the YHWH of most Old Testament stories is portrayed as being ‘a jealous god’ I am a little surprised that he totally ignores the fact that Abram and Sarai had tried to fix things themselves. Abraham’s faith seems to be far less than YHWH’s commitment the promise.
Later on we find that both Abraham and Sarah appear to scoff at the thought of YHWH fulfilling his promise to them because they are both geriatrics:
Gen 17:17-18 Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”
Interestingly, YHWH never actually agrees to bless Ishmael even though Abraham circumcises him (Gen 17:23). All YHWH says in answer to that request is, “Yes, but…” (Gen 17:19). Sarah also laughs when she hears that she’s going to have a baby. As I mentioned in a previous Signpost, YHWH of course has the last laugh though.
What does any of this say about faith? Reassuringly I think it indicates that doubt is part of faith. It may even strengthen it. Giving up on your god isn’t unusual. But unlike the simple Abraham and Sarah story you are hopefully not waiting for or expecting a promise to eventually be fulfilled. Wondering what’s going on, where is my god, why aren’t my prayers answered are all questions that don’t necessarily mean you have lost your faith. Quite the opposite. Faith is not something that we acquire with the wave of magic wand and then never let go.
And blind faith is not what I believe our god wants us to have either. Blind faith gives up seeking, doesn’t dare to ask questions, may well not open us up to what Yeshua seems to me to teach: meet every single thing you come across with love and compassion no matter how strange, alien or even unacceptable it may appear to be by your own or the standards of the society you live in.
Paul
P.S. I wonder if most of us don’t conflate and sometimes confuse the two meanings of the word ‘faith’ given by the Oxford Dictionary:
faith (noun)
- complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
- strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof
Sheep, goats, kings and crowns.
Signpost for Sunday 26 November 2023 (the Feast of Christ the King): Ezek 34:11-16, 20-24; Ps 100 or 95:1-7a; Eph 1:15-23; Matt 25:31-46.
The final season of the Crown came out this month. My wife and I just watched the first four episodes. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Fiction based on fact comes with one big problem – it often looks and feels more real than the real thing. The writer Peter Morgan gives us the ghost of Diana speaking to the then Prince Charles as well as to Queen Elizabeth II. That definitely didn’t happen, did it? Morgan’s explanation is that it’s not Diana’s ghost at all. He intended her ghostly appearance to suggest that Charles and the Queen felt Diana’s presence after her death, that in a way they spoke to her.
You might see where my thought s have been going this week. First off, of course, is that this Sunday is the ‘Feast of Christ the King’. That prompted me to think about having just watched the Crown.
Beyond that though, I remembered the open letter to The Times that Judi Dench wrote in October 2022, and in which she says, “I fear that a significant number of viewers… may take its version of history as being wholly true.”
Is there any parallel, I have been asking myself, between how we understand fiction based on historical events and the sacred texts I have come to believe are a mixture of history, poetry, drama, recollection and purpose?
And I was asking myself that question precisely because this week’s reading from Matthew, the famous sheep and goats passage, poses so many questions for so many people?
Here are five that struck me, for a start: Is this a parable or a prediction? What is the judgment of “all the nations” about? What exactly is the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels?” Am I a sheep or a goat?
I don’t think it’s a prediction. Or if it is, I suspect Yeshua wouldn’t have labelled it The Second Coming, as we might be thinking that’s what it’s referring to. I could be wrong, of course, but the phrase “second coming” never appears in the New Testament. And Matthew is writing around AD 80 for, among others, people living with the desolation that resulted from the Roman-Jewish war (AD 66-70). That’s almost certainly why the author of Matthew offers them this apocalyptic vision in the midst of the chaos they are living in.
I’ll be honest, one worry I have about Matthew 25:31-46 is that it might be a fledging organised church already using fear to keep its believers in line.
I suspect there is a bit that Yeshua might actually have said at some time, or a version of something someone remembered him saying. It’s in verses 35-36. To me they sound like Yeshua doing what he did most and best – trying to tell his listeners the best way to spend their time while they’re alive: any time you get the chance, don’t let anyone go hungry; if someone needs clothing of any kind give it to them if you can; welcome any stranger – they are lost in a new world; if you know someone who is sick or in prison, visit them – you probably won’t even have to say much but they will appreciate you being there.
All of which still leaves me feeling pretty sure I’d end up with the goats if the that part of the reading of actually came to pass. I have certainly never visited anyone in prison. I even said no when I was asked if I’d like to become a regular prison visitor and join a group from church who went every month.
If there’s truth in how Yeshua points out a good way to live, could that be the real point of this parable though? Maybe Yeshua is not describing what the afterlife has in store for any of us. Instead, is he pointing out those who are marginalised in society, and that they are the ones we need to focus on if anything is ever to change in this world. Perhaps that’s what the phrase, The kingdom of God is at hand really means.
Paul
P.S. This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, which means it’s also the end of the Signpost year. (I had a look over years gone by and the Feast of Christ the King seems to have become the one when we usually sign off.)
Thank you for putting up with Signposts becoming a Saturday or Sunday delivery at best, and for your words of encouragement over the last twelve months.
I noticed this week that the roads are already filling up with pre-Christmas traffic. Don’t let it stress us out. May you be blessed with the spirit of the coming season, which is peace, experience some joy of the season, which is hope, and feel the essence of the season, which is love.
Signposts will be back in February 2024, if you want them.
Love and peace till then, and beyond.
Got talent? Who knows?
Signpost for Sunday 19 November 2023: Judges 4:1-7; Ps 123; 1 Thess 5:1-11; Matt 25:14-30.
Here’s another parable I bet none of us really likes because we have been told that the master in the talents story is God or Jesus. And yet the master in the story is nothing like the god or Jesus most of us would like to meet. So I went in search of someone else who doesn’t like it. I came across a Catholic priest who offers these four thoughts, all of which strike me every time I read or hear the parable of the talents:
- This is not a story about the Kingdom of God. It does not begin with Matthew’s usual opening line, “the kingdom of God is like…”
- Nowhere does Yeshua/Jesus identify the master, the one who gives the talents, with God.
- At the end of the parable Slave no. 3 calls the master “a hard man,” ruthlessly benefitting from the toil of others (v. 24).
- Yeshua/Jesus would surely never suggest that Slave no. 3 should have grown his share of the talents by committing the sin of usury.
He then goes on to say: “All canonical parables of Jesus bear complicated literary histories. Probably none of them, as they exist polished in the Synoptic Gospels, hold the exact original form they had when Jesus spoke them.
Back in the fourth century, the Matthean version of the parable bugged Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339 CE). The good bishop was aware of an alternate version of the same parable. That other version was in the (currently lost) Gospel of the Nazoreans. Eusebius reports how that different version of the story went—the first slave is imprisoned, the second slave reprimanded, and the third slave blessed with joy.”
Sadly, he doesn’t come to any conclusion other than we have all been interpreting this parable wrongly for yonks.
I did find one possible way of interpreting the parable of the talents, though, courtesy of Craig Morton, a Mennonite pastor in Idaho, USA. He suggests that in the parable, Yeshua/Jesus is not the master. He is the third servant. He reasons that “In refusing to play the game, the third servant becomes like many political prisoners, disappeared journalists, assassinated social justice profits. Think Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Stephen Biko, Martin Luther King, and of course, Jesus.”
I have no idea whether he is right or not, but I like that thought better than I like the interpretation I have heard so many times about me having to make the most of my so-called God-given talents or that my faith might be lacking.
Paul
Signposts 