Peter’s Progress

I love spotting the April Fools articles in our newspapers. There are some fantastic reporters out there! The problem is, sometimes articles read like a joke but are for real. Funny world we live in. When I was a youth pastor at a large church down in Cape Town, I had a partner-in-crime on staff called Tim Smith. We heard that a new administrator, John McPetrie, was starting work on April 1 and decided to provide a little welcome for him. John’s office was situated on the ground floor of a large, double-story house. The room above him was a bathroom being renovated to become another office. The bath had been ripped out. Rotting floorboards had been replaced. Tim and I man-handled the cast iron bath into John’s office. We angled the rotten floor boards to look like the bath had fallen through the ceiling above. Then we sealed his door with red-and-white danger tape. Welcome, John! John proved to have a sense of humour, despite the fact that Tim and I were not around to remove the bath. The next year our staff team was talking about contested office spaces and being prepared to move offices if required. Tim and I decided to help John lead the way in the geopolitics of office space. We moved his entire office into the meeting room and laid it out exactly as he had left it, just in another room. (John, you were patient with us…) I could go on about other things we did, like the stone pigeon incident. We were fools indeed. But I’ve come to realise a greater truth in all this. We need to be fools for Christ – hold lightly to our pride and sense of self-importance. We need to embrace the ‘foolishness’ of God – his ‘foolishness’ proves to be greater than the wisdom of the wise. The world says be powerful, God says serve others. Hang onto your life? God says lay down your life. The first are justifiably first and the last are last for good reason? God says the first shall be last and the last shall be first. We need to keep alive the inner fool or fall into the trap of turning the outward form of our faith into a serious religion.