Compassionate Eyes

Brad breaks the rules. What happened in Vegas, doesn't stay in Vegas. Having just returned from a business seminar in Las Vegas he tells about a fresh work of grace in his heart that God revealed to him while he was there. That leads to a discussion with Wayne about how lost we can be in our own agendas and ambitions that we dehumanize the people we pass by and only think of them relative to how they impact us, or we can have eyes of compassion that see people for who they are and care about them. Living with eyes of compassion only happens when we slow down enough to see what God is doing around us, rather than rushing through our day.

3 Comments

  1. I loved the way Jesus looked on crowds too. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

    Brad, this is just BERWILLIANT and I am so excited, bro, that I had to stop 10 mins into the podcast to come say so. I LOVE hearing about the way this Papa continues to set us free. Thanks for sharing it 🙂

  2. Hi Wayne and Brad.

    Love your podcasts and was listening to your conversation recently about how gatherings go all formal and restrained when we get to the ‘organized’ bits. It reminded me of a reference to a ‘non conference’ some years back that was part of Canadian designer Bruce Mau’s incomplete manifesto…

    Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

    I looked it up and here’s what Hans Ulrich Obrist himself said about it.

    “(…) we decided, a few hours before the event was supposed to take place, to cancel the conference and to just do a “non-conference.” It had all the ingredients of a conference — badges, tee shirts, bags with all the speakers’ CVs, a hotel where all the people would stay, a bus to pick them up in the morning and bring them to the science center, people at the airport picking the guests up, all of the logistics — but the conference no longer was there. It was just a coffee break. It was the invention of this idea that we should just do a coffee break.”

    This came from that observation that obviously at a conference the most important things happen in the coffee break. Why do the rest? We’ll just do the coffee breaks.

    The most important things happen in interstitial spaces, they happen in between, and they happen when we least expect it. Incredible things happened. The artists visited the science labs they were interested in. At the end we made a little film, and everybody spoke about his or her impressions. We published a set of postcards. It was the first conference as a coffee break, of which we did many afterwards.

    I have always struggled with the organized bits of church life and find the community found before, after and around the edges so much more real and rewarding. The guilt however that somehow this is not enough or really ‘church’ is often still lurking just below the surface…

    Darlene
    (Auckland NZ)

  3. Darlene,
    Thanks so much for your contribution. I ran with your idea (and Obrist’s) on my website, and the reaction from church-goers was hardly positive!
    http://www.sparklingadventures.com/index.php?id=831
    I’m so perplexed how something so simple can be seen as negative or a threat! Surely it wouldn’t harm the institutional church to think outside the box for just one Sunday a year!
    Love,
    Lauren. (Australia)

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