WithoutWax.tv by Pete Wilson | Tag Archive | Clowning In Rome
Tag Archive - Clowning In Rome

What Community Doesn’t Do

July 28, 2010 in Family, Relationships with 37 Comments

I’m a huge fan of community. I write and preach about how important and essential I believe it is quite often. But today I want to remind you of what community doesn’t do.

In Clowning in Rome (which I highly recommend)  Henri Nouwen wrote:

We constantly feel tempted to want more from those around us than they can give. We relate to our neighbors with the hope and the supposition that they are able to fulfill most of our deepest needs, and then we find ourselves disillusioned, angry, and frustrated when they do not.

We know when we expect someone else to…

complete us

take our pain away

understand us completely

heal us

that we are expecting something which cannot be given by another human being. But while we know this is illogical our loneliness and brokenness still pushes us to expect it anyway leaving us disillusioned and angry.

There are some things community just can’t do.

Clowning Around

February 8, 2010 in Missions, Spiritual Growth with 30 Comments

Got a call from a buddy right before my trip who in essence said, “Pete why are you going to India right now? You need to be promoting Book #1 and I know your writing book #2. You guys are having record settings weekends at Cross Point, you’re getting ready to open a 4th campus and you’ve got a new teaching series you need to work on. Couldn’t you have found a less busy time?”

He’s got a great heart but I think there was a part of him that felt as if I was almost being a little irresponsible. Almost as if I were clowning around when more important things needed to be tended to. None of his concerns were new to me.  I had selfishly thought every one of those things myself.

We tend to put things in categories:

Things that are important. Things that aren’t.
People who matter. People who don’t.

Henri Nouwen explains in Clowning in Rome(which is rocking my world right now)…

Clowns are not in the center of the events. They appear between the great acts, fumble and fall, and make us smile again after the tensions created by the heroes we came to admire. The clown don’t have it together, they do not succeed in what they try to do , they are awkward, out of balance, and left handed, but…they are on our side. We respond to them not with admiration but with sympathy, not with amazement but with understanding, not with tension but with a smile.

The church today is full of lion tamers and trapeze artists whose dazzling feats claim our attention and elicit our applause and yet what the Kingdom so desperately needs is more clowns.

In a way this is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 20:  16“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” In other words the way up is down.

In God’s Kingdom it’s not the ring leader or the trapeze artist who grabs the spotlight but it’s the clown who simply prays, God may I evoke a smile and awaken hope today, even in a city terrorized by violence, poverty and despair.

I’ve never spent way too much of my life trying to get to the center of the ring. Time to head in a different direction. Time to be a clown!