I had a curious experience yesterday, shared with others I later discovered. I had been out all morning and came back home in the middle of the afternoon. When I sat down at my computer, I found a list of e-mails from myself. It seemed a bit strange; I looked more closely. I had 63 e-mails, all from my own address, that had somehow come back home. Some of these dated back to 2005; the most recent was sent just before Christmas; there was no rhyme or reason to them; they were all to different people, different addresses, different providers.
I've since spoken to two other people who have blueyonder addresses and they had the same thing happen to them, one with fewer, the other with three times as many as me.
It was something that I'd never come across before and I don;'t really understand why it should have happened now; we wondered whether Virgin are clearing out some cyber-filing cabinet and getting rid of 'stuff' or what; any ideas?
What it did set me wondering was this: did these e-mails ever arrive at their destination? Have they been sitting in cyber-space for years waiting to go home, trying to get to their destination, but going nowhere? If you expected an e-mail from me sometime in the last 5 years and didn't get it, I now have an excuse! As Elvis said: they've been returned to sender.
We tell people things, but do they actually get the message. Over the years, we have made changes to some quite fundamental parts of Church life and as far as I'm concerned, these changes have been explained over and over again, clearly and simply, and people have 'got the message'. Then someone will say something that reveals that evidently they have not got the message at all.
We have two responsibilities: the first is to communicate, to speak, to tell people what we think, what we need, to0 tell people the gospel and to speak clearly and humbly, with words full of grace and love.
The second is to listen, to engage properly with what other people are saying so that we hear what they say. Sometimes we don't want to hear and so we don't listen at all and we pretend we've got the message or complain that we were never told. It seems that listening is harder than speaking, but its the only way we'll get the message.
