This year, when you
look at the offering poster on the wall of your church, there’s
a strange new presence in the middle. Is it a fruit? Is it a
heart? Well, yes, it’s both of those things . . . and
more. For many people, it takes a while to see anything else.
(It may help if you cover the left or right half of the image.)
It’s a pair of figures whose dance forms a joyful circle.
This image is the first attempt the offering has ever made to
focus graphically on what may be the most central word in its
name: Sharing.
The challenge of focusing on this word runs much deeper than
the difficulty of rendering it graphically. When we hear it,
many of us hear only the call for us to give up some of what
we have. No wonder we react defensively. It sounds like a polite
shakedown. But the word’s invitation is both more threatening
and, potentially, more freeing than that—it invites us
to lose not only what we own, but the notion that we own anything
at all.
So long as we depend on our own resources, what we own is
our only security; little surprise that we can never have enough
and that we resent the idea of giving any of it up. But what
is harder to see is how this ownership owns us and keeps us
in perpetual slavery to the notion of having more. God invites
us to recognize through sharing that so long as our hands are
full of what we have, they will never be open to what God offers
us next. One Great Hour of Sharing invites us to open our hands
as well as our hearts to one another and to the fullness God
is continually offering us.
—Elder Alan Krome, associate for special offerings, Mission
Interpretation, Communication and Funds Development, General
Assembly Council |
