Christian Viewpoint: The moment the light want on: 'That’s the kind of guy I would follow!'
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Paul’s mother dropped him off at school in Katwijk in Holland.
Normally the teenager cycled, but he’d injured his leg and was using crutches. As he struggled out of the car, another pupil, whom he didn’t know well, asked: “Can I carry your bag for you?” They became best friends.
That was a significant moment for Paul Haringman, Inverness Presbytery’s mission development worker. Paul gets alongside 28 local Churches of Scotland, helping individual congregations assess their work and plan for the future. As a teenager he was rather negative about the Dutch Reformed Church he attended with his parents – old hymns, a preacher clad in black: depressing. “Why would I give my life to that?” he wondered. If God is real, surely church should be dynamic, relevant to everyday life?
He saw a film retelling the life of Jesus and, fascinated, watched this young man relating easily to people as they went about their daily lives, somehow bringing peace and joy and healing. “That’s the kind of guy I would follow!” Paul responded.
It was about this time he met the boy who carried his bag. His new friend introduced him to a group of Christians among whom he felt accepted and at home, invited to ask questions rather than listening passively to answers. Seeing the genuineness of these people of faith, “the light just went on,” Paul tells me. “I was just blown away by who God is.”
His involvement in an international Christian mission, The Navigators, brought Paul and his wife Vera to Scotland in 2003. They’ve been based in the north since 2010.
Over the years, Paul’s vision of what church is like at its best has grown. It is a vision of a 24/7 community of Jesus-followers, living distinctively, welcoming and trusting others, accepting people as they are and respecting their faith journeys. Seeing every movement of love, grace and peace in the community, every longing for something better as an expression of God at work and joining in.
But Paul’s a realist. He knows people both inside and outside the church are flawed and broken.
He reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where a shattered vase is repaired with lacquer and gold pigment so that it becomes in its brokenness something more beautiful than ever. And thus God comes to us in our messed-up lives. God’s presence heals and holds us so that in our brokenness something of the loveliness of Jesus is seen. This loveliness is visible in our practical, down-to-earth daily kindnesses, like a teenager offering to carry a schoolbag.
And daily, Jesus comes alongside us as we bear our burdens and says “Can I carry those for you?”
