Mutual Encouragement in Every Event

Count it all joy, brothers and sisters...(James 1:2)

We watched an old movie the other night, Zorba the Greek. It's one of my favorites, starring Alan Bates and Anthony Quinn (as Zorba). Almost no one I know remembers this excellent movie, or has read the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. This is unfortunate.

The story is one of two very different men, one younger and the other older, one an intellectual and the other a man of the earth, one intellectual and disembodied--and the other with a wild mind and a passionate body. In the course of the story, they develop an intense friendship, suffer and delight together in many of life's events, and ultimately influence one another deeply. The younger man is most changed, for he is enabled to embrace life as it presents itself--with an open heart, equally willing to rejoice and to ache. In a culminating moment of dramatic failure and the literal collapse of their great, shared business venture, the young man finally asks Zorba to teach him to dance an individual's wild, personal dance on the beach--at the very place of their economic calamity.

Zorba says, "A man needs a little madness, or else....Or else, he never dares cut the rope and be free!"

How many of us lapse into "never daring" to be impassioned in our relationships, our tasks, our ministries, or our witness for the generous Christ? How important is it to us that the brothers and sisters in our churches give one another mutual instruction and encouragement for life-embracing joy, teaching one another to dance with passion, and to become the great-souled persons we are called to be?