Reflections from Laneway Labyrinth

This is some of the stuff people talked about while we debreifed the Laneway Labyrinth walk over supper on Thursday night:

• Contrast between what's going on out the front of places (shops, hotels, restaurants, bars) and what's going on out the back. Often when we visit these places we don't think about who's working out the back, or the kind of conditions they're working in.
• The immense amount of stuff we throw out. We import all this stuff, often produced by people who don't have enough to eat, and then we chuck a lot of it out anyway!
• A sense that God is not just in the nice, safe, well-lit places that our society celebrates, but also in the dark, dirty places where our society hides it's less attractive aspects.
• We don't have to go far to encounter God. God is right here.
  

Laneway Labyrinth is on tonight

Street magic

So on Friday night I was doing a city walk with some high school students from Canterbury Baptist Church, and we had to do the first bit on the front steps of the church, instead of in the sanctuary, because our annual fundraising concert was on in the sanctuary. So I was reading with the kids from the start of Mark's Gospel, and this lady who was walking past, looking like she was dressed for a night out on the town, stopped and said to us, 'What are you doing? Are you reading the Bible?' I said, 'Yeah, we're going 'round the city a bit and reading scripture in a few different places,' and she said, 'Are you Christians?' and I said we were. She said, 'Okay, I've got something to show you then.' I was thinking, Uh-oh, what's she going to do... She showed us a little red hankerchief and said, 'Sometimes people tell me that because you can't see God, he doesn't exist.' She squashed the hankerchief into her fist, and then opened to hand to show us that the hankerchief wasn't there anymore, and said, 'You can't see it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist!' And she meade it reappear again.