What's in a nothing? Matt 5:3

A few of us in the office ended up have a interesting discussion around the whole idea of ‘becoming nothing’. It’s not that we ‘are’ nothing, and it’s not emptiness as much as it is a filling. The Eastern mystics teach that in order to connect with the eternal consciousness we must ‘become and stay empty or ‘nothing’. With Christianity, we believe that the emptying ourselves of the desire for things, of selfish ambition and of sin nature – creates an openness – which enables more of Christ to fill the void. As we touched on in the earlier Beatitude posting, it a positional revelation that very much effects disability ministries. Whomever we encounter, we come as servants with a definitive task: How do I move this person closer to Christ. As we serve those in our own ministry, we want to serve from this mindset. If I serve from a position of poverty of spirit, I’m not descending to serve a disabled person, but ascending a person in how I serve – whatever that service may be – from practical living to emotional and spiritual supports. In reality, it has very little to do with the ‘diagnosis’ of the other person, and everything to do with my own internal relationship with God. I’m going to state my own momentary opinionated thought here – I’m wondering if we do a dis-service by trying to separate out ‘disability ministries’ - because it is primarily about how we minister to ‘people’ – regardless. We are people serving people in the name of Christ, not a label or a condition. Isn’t this what moves us from being a ‘service provider’ to doing and being a ‘ministry’? The complexity is this, we do need to understand diagnosis’s and the conditions in order to provide responsible supports to the people we serve, but we need to ensure we never let the label precede the person, which is true of any ministry situation.
Anyway, I was just thinking,

Neil