I'm on a train headed home from the best Bibleschool I've ever been to. Eastern was absolutely wonderful.
All three speakers said something that I can take away from it:
John Bilello said in his exhortation, "Don't confuse the truth with the people in it."
I thought that was a great quote--quite often we follow certain people who we think have it all right, when in reality, they could very well be wrong. Not everything said in every Christadelphian class is exactly right on everything, whether the speaker is from the USA, Australia, England, or wherever.
Mark O'Grady made an object lesson--he said "Say we were in a complete eclipse and it was midnight and it was pitch black in here and someone came in the room and lit a candle/light. That light would shine, you'd be able to see it from all over the room. If they lit a bright light it would dispel all the darkness that's in the room. Say someone walked in here and they had a box, and you say 'well, what's in your box? (imagine Mark saying this like a really excited person)' and they said 'oh I've got a box full of darkness!' And you take it to the center of the room and...you take the lid off! What happens to the darkness, does it fill the room? So what's that telling us? Light overcomes darkness. Be not overcome with evil, says Paul, but overcome evil with good."
And Jonathan Bowen told us a sad story about one of his friends from high school, who he got in a debate with about heaven/hell-going. And Jonathan won the debate, but his friend thus left Christianity because he was no longer worried about burning in hell, so basically, even though Jon won the battle, he lost the "war", saying that we shouldn't be out to "win", but rather to "win someone over to Christ". How often do we do that?
We have these stupid divisions and such and people leave because of them. So we might win the battle of being right, but we still lose in the long run because we lost a member of the body, or a potential member of the body.
I can't say enough about how wonderful it was to be with those brothers and sisters. It was my first time and I was welcomed with open arms and felt right at home, almost as if I'd known those people for many years. Those New England people are pretty cool. And I've known that xD
