Help Me, Rhonda
One of the great blessings of co-hosting the Wayside Podcast with the Rev. Wesley Arning are the conversations with incredible people that are filled with enriching insights. Wesley and I recently reflected on the 35 episodes we recorded in the fall and summer. Looking through our first season, the choice was a no-brainer: Our conversation in November with the Rev. Chris Bowhay, Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Columbia, Tenn.
Towards the end of our expansive and hilarious conversation, he shared an experience he had in an improvisation class he was taking. The class students worked on an exercise to create stories based on random adjectives and nouns. One team had a particularly tough one to incorporate: “beautiful debris.” Chris recounted how the first two teammates bungled the exercise and took their improvised story to a place that, to him, seemed “irreparable.” Here is what Chris recounted:
“And then, this next participant, Rhonda, wove together those mistakes — those errors — and somehow brought it into the story. She took all the broken pieces so the group could move forward into the future of the story. And you know what the move is called in improv? Justification. The skit was justified, brought into alignment by Rhonda after all of these errors. Which was not to truncate or ignore the errors, but to incorporate them into the team effort.”
I am still blown away by the freshness this story brings to a heady, yet familiar, concept and word for most Christians! What a powerful illustration of the endlessly wonderful work of justification and rectification that God has accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of His incarnate Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Praise God that, despite our brokenness and constant erring as fallen humanity, our story, much like the improv skit above, is not irreparable.
What’s more, this illustration reminds us that God is not one to give up on us fallen humans, hit the cosmic CTRL+ALT+DELETE buttons and restart from scratch just because we have taken it off course. No, we are still His creatures that He looked upon and called not just “good” but “very good” (Genesis 1:31). And as His “very good” Creation, we are invited into the grace of His work that gathers all of us c mess and all — and brings us back into alignment with Him and His perfect love for His creation.
Let’s all pray a word of thanks to God today for Rhonda and Chris who gave a wonderful illustration and “above all [for His] inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ.”¹
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1 The General Thanksgiving, Daily Morning Prayer, Rite One, “The Book of Common Prayer”
