Allow to give a little glimpse into some of what motivates what I write about.
There can be something in my mind that’s worth writing about. I’ll give it a miss for the time being and then something else will crop up that insists that what needed to be written about before, needs to be written about more than ever before. I don’t tend to knock it the second time when it’s so insistent.
The first time it came a knocking was when I was engaging in a conversation among a group of believers. One particularly influential and insightful member of the group shared a story about how there was a faulty door in the home. For years they had just lived with the fault, only to discover when tidying up the loft that there was a perfectly suitable door already capable of replacing the faulty door.
There was plenty that we as a group received from the story that had much to do with life as church. People chipped in more to enrich the insight we were gathering about not only what was needed, but how that which we need is not always discovered. It was a really stirring and inspiring conversation. I was going to write about it, but I let it go.
On another day, I was in the company of a friend who I admire a great deal. He had been a pivotal leader in a fellowship of believers for a number of years. Then on retirement he settled into a different fellowship. This fellowship were going through a transition period and my friend was on hand to support the fellowship through it. In doing so he got the group of people to consider questions they had not even bothered to think about before. Questions that explored who they were as a fellowship and what they considered their needs to be. As they outlined this, it allowed that group of believers to recognise that a lot of things they had assumed and worse still left to others were aspects of Body Life they were more than capable of discovering themselves.
Hearing this connected with the first episode. We can be used to expecting something new to come in and fix a lot of things. Or we can believe that the state of mediocrity we’re in will never be changed until something brand new comes in to change things. We can gripe about the state of things and keep asking for something new to come in.
It might be worth exploring first, however, that rather than seeking for the new from beyond, it’s worth seeing if we’ve made the most of what we have within. Have we recognised what’s already there, or have we allowed issues and troubles to cover over the very things God has placed among us to bring us what we’re looking for?
Perhaps it will take a thorough cleaning up of what’s inside to see what’s been there all along. Maybe it will take a few decent questions to explore with God together to see what He has placed among us from the start.
(Photo by NICK SELIVERSTOV on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
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