In his hometown, when...
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In his hometown, when Jesus began to stand out from the crowd, the neighbors said, "Isn't this the carpenter?" Yes, he was. But he was more. The neighbors could understand him as a carpenter, as son of Mary, a brother to his brothers and sisters. But they failed to comprehend when another dimension of him began to emerge. Often we, too, fail to perceive the extra dimensions of life.
A century ago, a fellow in Illinois acquired a huge acreage of land. Methodist Bishop McCabe, before he was a bishop, visited this man and was shown about the place. The man stood in an open field, waved his arms in every direction around him, and said to McCabe, "It's all mine; I go as far as you can see to the west, and the north, and the east, and the south." Then, pointing up toward the sky, McCabe asked, "And how far up that way do you go?" And, it is said, the man didn't even know what the question meant.
Do we? Our culture is terribly horizontal. Most of us reach out in almost every direction, but how far up do we go?
-- Mann
