September 08, 2010
Missing You
The woman who was subject to bleeding for 12 years touched the cloak of Jesus and was healed. “At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’” (Mark 5:30 NIV) I sometimes have a similar feeling when a faithful saint goes home to be with the Lord. At least for a moment, it feels as though some portion of spiritual power is drained from the Body of Christ.
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Gail;
-----One of the greater aggravations I have had with environmental extremism is its penchant for gazing into minutia. Some weed or sucker minnow or mouse that has the slightest physical deviation from any norm gets classified as a new species, then whole projects for vital human services are brought to their knees to pay it obeisance. I have a client who for many years sold chemical sensing equipment. I asked him if much of our environmental concerns were actually due to our ability to detect more and more minute traces of chemicals rather than to there becoming more and more chemicals present in the environment. He confirmed my suspicion. We can now detect the presence of molecules beyond parts per million. We can now detect parts per billion, and even parts per trillion. That is very minute.
-----But the presence of a single molecule of pollution in a room can indeed have a major effect upon another molecule beside it. That effect can be very real and altering. The effects of a certain weed or sucker minnow or mouse in the area where it lives can also be very real to the twig the mouse might chew, or to the bird which might feed the minnow to its chic. Focusing the mind upon minutia requires acknowledgement of these effects. To the overall room, however, one molecule of pollution altering a single molecule beside it is not worthy of the slightest thought. Its effects don’t even register on the overall system of things in the room. And 99.9% of all known species are extinct. Somehow life has survived without the presence of vast numbers of sucker minnow and kangaroo mouse species far longer than our short lifetimes.
-----This is the way it is with the Body of Christ and the passing of a member. Yes, the Body of Christ looses much with one death. That person had more ongoing effects upon others in and out of the Body throughout her lifetime than a single molecule may have had upon its surroundings. And the power of her future effects is lost to her passing, although the power of her past effects remains in the positive changes to other lives she inspired. Yet, overall, the Body of Christ seems unaffected by her passing.
-----Environmental extremists do the human cause great damage by focusing fearsome alarm upon the single molecule. Many Christian leaders have done the Body of Christ much damage by focusing fearsome alarm upon church, and paradigms, and theologies. When Jesus said, “...as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me,” (Matt 25:40) He was partaking in an attitude of the environmental extremist. He was focusing upon minutia, because to Him minutia was paramount to the extreme of sacrificing Himself. That is why it is about you. And that is why the overwhelming call of the Bible to good behavior is a call to behavior towards the one person beside you at the moment he is beside you. The new life is about minutia, not of the minute elements which will melt away with fervent heat, but of the individual, spiritual souls which will live on in joyful, eternal glory. When one of these souls passes on to glory, there is a definite drain from the Body of Christ lingering on in this broken place.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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