Have you read about the contrast between people who are messy and those who are neat-freaks? Messies don’t pick up after themselves; they are oblivious to standards of neatness. Cleanliness is not a high value. They do life without having to place everything in order. Their desks are a mess. Their shoes lie around the closet or house. Dishes in the kitchen. Workshops seemingly piled with tools yet they usually know where to start searching.
Neat-freaks are the opposite.
So recently I was in a meeting with other church leaders and we got to talking about sharing worship space. Usually (at least currently; in the future the “shoe” could be on the other foot)…usually, it is an Anglo congregation sharing space in THEIR church building with an ethnic congregation. I have heard the difficulty expressed many times, “They don’t clean up the rooms; they leave them messy.” Or, “They just let their kids run all over the place. It’s chaos!” Or, “They cook in the church kitchen and the smell of their food doesn’t go away!”
Some of these issues stem from different cultural values. God must get a kick out of watching how we rub each other the wrong way sometimes. This got me to wondering if Jesus would fit in more naturally with the messies or the neat-freaks.
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