March 02, 2015
Heavy Hearted
I walked into a church, picked up a bulletin, slid
into a pew and waited for what I perceived was the tail end of an adult Sunday
school class to finish. However, as I listened to the woman behind the music
stand I sensed I’d stepped into a business meeting. I was early for the 10:30 worship
service, so when two women greeted me I verified their start time. One looked
at the other and said, “What other churches in town start at 10:30?” As they
began to rattle off different church names I realized they were trying to help
me find someplace to worship. While the group of under 20 people dispersed and left
the building, the woman behind the music stand approached me apologetically, “We
aren’t having services today.” I learned that the bulletin was from the
previous week, the pastor no longer filled the pulpit, and the church members
were organizing to take a church inventory. The membership of this little
church was heavy hearted and their countenance downcast — no doubt very similar
to the loneliness experienced by the apostles as they waited for the resurrection
of Jesus.
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----We get too proximate to our own causes. Our minds are so tiny they hardly attend more than the current moment, and our eyes are just little peep holes. We can’t hear more than thirty feet away. And a thing must be within arms length for us to feel its texture. Surely this should be enough to humble us in the enormity of life going on beyond our own personal sensations. Yet we regard ourselves and our own affairs as just that, sensational.
-----The little church lost its pastor, and evidently from the fact they gathered to inventory, they had lost their core with him. That’s a sweet disposition towards the pastor, but a misplaced one. The little church was enlarged in their minds unto the consumption of their complete awareness. It is easy to get that way, especially when you built the church with significant friends, neighbors, and others.
-----But that isn’t the problem, though it is sad. The church being The Church is the problem. Everywhere across the valley are fifty other churches. They’re all quite like this little church and each other, having in them the good, the bad, and maybe what drove their preacher away, the ugly. And they all have Jesus at least in a few of their hearts. These folks could have gone to any one of many other places to worship with genuinely good people, had their perception of being not been so bounded by the horizons of their own senses. The stuff would have stayed put at their little church building for a good inventorying the next day so they could go worship with the saints.
-----For many years I’ve wanted to make and carry in my pocket a small bagful of an object lesson. With all the signs in the heavens and behaviors of the world now pointing so strongly to a never before more immediate tribulation, this Spring I will buy a thin, little mirror to break into dime sized pieces.
-----We so think we reflect Jesus, and we do, but not quite like we think. Imagine this, unless you want to get your own mirror and bust it up. Stand at the edge of your table. You reflect Jesus. So slip one piece of your broken mirror onto the table, lean forward slightly until you can look down into the mirror piece. How much of your reflection can you see in it? I could maybe see one of my giant nose nostrils. And we each reflect Jesus like this, just the little piece of Him we personally have somewhat gotten right. Now slip all the other couple dozen mirror pieces onto the table and push them together into a grouping. Now how much can you see? A Lot more, of course, and maybe broken up by the spaces between the pieces, but still, their combined reflections are a more complete one.
-----Our experience in the Lord, and therefore our reflection of Him, is not complete without the rest of His reflective body parts. We’re all given to the Lord, but we’re each just a bit of His reflection. We all go to churches we sense to be the church, but each is just a piece of His reflection. He is so immense that He needs an entire world of faithfuls to reflect a bigger piece of Him. Each of us is giant in His estimation, nearly as large as we are in our own, I presume, but each is tiny, actually. His estimation is as much a merciful regard as our own is an errant anomally.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Steve,
Great object lesson!
Gail
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