I love what Rob Bell has to say, some people criticize him, they say it’s nothing new. But for me, when he speaks, he draws me in and has a way of presenting ideas and concepts in a unique, captivating way. In his new DVD Drops Like Stars he tackles the issue of suffering…
Rob talks about how there can be ‘art in the agony’. How suffering hurts but it also creates. When we think about the moments which define us, who we are as a person, it’s usually the tough things of life.
I have stolen the bit below from the DVD. Throughout the DVD he talks about what he calls the ‘creative responses’ to suffering – the Art of solidarity – standing alongside someone as they hold their pain, not offering explanations or answers just being there, honesty – suffering brings out honesty, we loose the facade, the front, the small talk…the art of disruption, elimination, failure and so on.
Here he talks about the Art of Possession. I strongly connected with this because of my experience living in a place where most people don’t own much and yet possess everything. I saw people around me with none of the stuff or the comforts I have and felt myself longing to have what they had. The Christians I knew in Cambodia had a profound, intimate joyful, connection with God.
Rob Bell talks about how he wanted to experience the realities of the HIV pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. He was in a village in Kigali, Rwanda listening to women and their children’s stories, women and their children living with HIV. They told him their stories…
They were telling him what it is like living with a disease which you can’t even say by name because of the social stigma attached to it.
It got to the end of their time with the women and they could hear some people setting up a room. They went into the room and saw a room full of people. They saw something compelling, captivating.
Rob Bell describes what he saw and what his cameraman caught on film. “It’s hard to put in words”, he says. “These people were caught up in something. It was like an unadulterated, pure ecstasy, moving with such freedom and liberation, a joy that you could just reach up and grab out of the air. And I am watching these people, in an unrestrained celebration, wondering what has just happened here. What is it which is causing this spontaneous joy and ecstasy? So I found someone and asked them and the guy told me “oh, they do this every day at lunch”.
You can own everything you are supposed to own in the modern world to be happy and satisfied and yet at that very moment in some way to be possessing next to nothing. While at the same time someone on the other side of the world who has experienced hunger, thirst and disease, and genocide is at that moment owning next to nothing but possessing everything.
There is a difference between ownership and possession. You can own lots of things and yet posses next to nothing. While it is also possible to own next to nothing and be possessing everything.
Sometimes it takes suffering for us to learn the difference. Having nothing and yet possessing everything.
Agape 