We first moved into this church building in December of 1996. The parking lot had been base-coated, but not top-coated. So, for the winter months there were no parking stripes out there. People made up their own minds where they wanted to park, and which way they wanted to park. We developed some very inefficient patterns.
When the spring came and the asphalt people returned to finished up the paving and striping, there was mass confusion. The stripes had been placed according to the master plan, but people had already set their own parking patterns, and now they didn’t know what to do. I learned two valuable lessons from that:
1. If we don’t tell people how they should park (or do anything), they’ll each do their own thing and cause chaos.
2. Once people get a pattern set in their heads, they do not like to change it.
I suppose those lessons relate to repentance, as well. Its hard to change our life patterns, but not doing it according to the Master’s Plan can really be inefficient. Let’s relearn and repent.
Tags: habits, patterns, repentance
Anita got me a great gift for Christmas. It was the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection on DVD. Harold Lloyd was a pioneer film maker and actor in the silent movie era. He made his mark in Hollywood history with his 1923 silent Safety Last. Harold Lloyd owned his own film company and never syndicated his films to be distributed by later companies. Only recently has his family digitized these films and released them on DVD to the public.
In the days when sexual inuendos and plays on words were not possible, Harold relied on creative film methods and visual illusions to entertain. His action-packed scenes high up on building sides and racing down crowded city streets leave the viewer sitting on the edge of their seats and chuckling with delight.
Harold Lloyd is on my list of heros for his effort to break entertainment patterns and pioneer new visual methods, setting a pattern for other filmmakers to follow and improve. I pray God would help me to break patterns in the church world and pioneer new methods for making disciples who make disciples.
Tags: hero, patterns, pioneer