Happy Belated Birthday, Granny!

Yesterday was this sassy lady's birthday! Spending the day with my mom today made me really appreciative of my Granny's greathearted love which she passed to her and, while it's a work in painfully slow progress, might resound in me. 

Granny's bday falls on the feast of St. Barnabas. People don't stop to give Barnabas props as often as we should. After all, he was instrumental in getting the Jerusalem Christian community to accept newly converted Paul (or the artist formerly known as Saul of Tarsus). Paul had quite the rap sheet; I can't imagine the brokering the Bman had to go through to help integrate one of the future most influential figures of the early church into The Way. 

While I wasn't there, I'm sure those Christians present at Stephen's stoning (that Paul condoned) took one look at Barnabas with his newly converted Tarsus colleague and muttered something like, "You serious, Clark?" 

After easing the once hunter of Christians into the growing community, Barnabas took on the arduous task of lobbying for the admission of gentile converts into the Christian community. If you don't know, this was a hotly debated issue in the early church. When studying this in class, I once had a student comment, "That's like sitting next to someone in Bama shirt [at an LSU home game]. Awkward." Yeah, I guess it must have been. It's no wonder we invoke him as a peacemaker. 

Some of my earliest spiritual memories are of my Granny telling us we needed to pray for peace -- that there were bad things going on in far away places called Bosnia, and if we prayed, there'd be peace. I would drag my hand across the globe they kept in the living room, picturing all the people I'd never meet who I was lifting up in prayer. I remember thinking what a great responsibility I had and how important prayer was. The lesson my Granny was teaching us was that you need to model peace with your life; that peace was possible when we partook in it.  Side note: Granny probably didn't mean for me to think so deeply into it... but... then again... 

So happy (belated) birthday, Granny! And happy (belated) feast of St. Barnabas!