Bringing God Into the Conversation

Lately, I have found it much easier to bring up God in conversation.  Observe.

What did you do today?

 - I toured a homeless shelter.  The church I work for is looking for opportunities to serve the community and the Ocean Park Community Center provides the homeless with not just a meal, but all kinds of services, from shelter to job training to accountability to community.

How was your weekend?

 - Pretty cool.  The church I work for helped organize over 200 people to clean up the beach in Santa Monica.

What's new?

 - Oh, I had this cool thing happen.  At the church where I work, the pastor came up with this art project to coincide with his next sermon series that involves artists doing pieces with windows.  And he asked me to find 10 windows.  Which I thought was going to be either expensive or a lot of searching.  But I went on Craigslist and there was an ad for 10 free windows, to be used only for art projects, not for building.

Where do you work?

 -  I work for a new church in Santa Monica.

Have you notices the common thread?  To be fair, I'm not mentioning God at all, but mentioning that you work at a church is a really easy way to slip God into the conversation unobtrusively.  He's there, but you don't have to force Him into the conversation.

Which has made me realize something.  Like a lot of you, I've always felt embarrassed about bringing God into a conversation.  But I'm realizing that it's not the God part that I'm embarrassed about, it's the bringing-into-the-conversation part.  I simply don't like to force God into a conversation, when it doesn't come up naturally.  Now that it comes up organically, as part of what I do for work, it doesn't feel embarrassing at all.

Which reinforces something else that's often bothered me.  Too many times I've heard a pastor or other church worker talk about evangelism.  Which is fine.  But then they'll give an example of how they were sitting next to someone on a plane (or in a coffee shop, or while surfing, etc.), and the person asked what they do for a living, and it came out that they're a pastor.  Which led to them talking about God, which led to an opportunity to witness to the person.  And isn't it great how that came up organically?  And really, we all should be trying to have these organic conversations with people.

Ya know what?  Those people need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that they're living in an insulated bubble where it is much easier to talk about God if your job is at a church.  How about giving an example that doesn't involve your job?  How about helping folks figure out how to do it when they don't work at a church?  I'm just sayin'.