And with the rain the long drought is brought to a close……………..
It’s been a long time since I last blogged. (April 14th to be exact. I know someone is going to bring that up:) Usually you don’t wait that long between posts because you lose readers. I’m sure I have. There are probably some that won’t see this one. There is a reason, though, that I thought was extremely relevant.
I didn’t have anything to say.
I know that many of you have trouble believing that, but it’s true. Over the last few months I have gone through a drought of motivation to write. I don’t want to write something simply to fill space. There’s enough of that dribble out there. I want the things that I put down to have some meaning or to spark conversation. We need more of that than we do discussion on whether Miley should leave Disney and the Hannah Montana show. (Personally I think she should stick out her contract, but that’s just me…..)
So here I am after all of this time and I know you are wondering what wonderful tidbit of inspiration has hit me now, so here it is.
Everything starts with love.
Wow. Now that I’ve dropped that wonderful piece of literary genius on you I think we can get on with life! It’s so simple. Can’t do anything without love! It makes so much sense! In fact, all of the problems of the world can be solved with love and we’ve cornered the market on it. Most of us great (in our own minds) church leaders (once again, in our own minds) have promoted love as the answer to everything and promoted our churches as the most loving place you could ever be. In fact we’ve basically stated under our breath that you won’t find love in the world, but you will always find it inside the hallowed doors of our stately institutions.
There’s only one problem with all this. We didn’t remember to really teach and practice it. We just told everyone to love each other. We’ve preached the Bible “at” our congregations instead of walking it “with” them. We’ve told everyone what to do, but not how to do it. We’ve turned a blind eye to the unloving behavior within our own walls so that the more powerful within our organizations wouldn’t leave and even participated in decisions devoid of love so that the organization could continue on the path that we considered important. We have said one thing but often practiced another, most of the time rationalizing our actions as being the best thing for the church we shepard. Consequently our congregations have taken that lead and followed us directly into the footsteps that we left behind. In the wake of this type of leadership we have left many by the side of the road complaining of hypocrisy and false teaching. We’ve caused people to question the words of Christ because we compromised them to fit our own agendas. All of this while we have shut down anyone who had thoughts or teachings that went outside of the boxes that we had created. If it did not agree with what we were teaching then it must not be “truth”. Thousands upon thousands of churches all teaching “truth” and yet most of them don’t actually agree on what “truth” actually is. We speak of unity within the church, but at the same time we tell people to beware of the false teachers who try to tell you something that doesn’t sound exactly like what we are teaching.
So, what does love really have to do with all of this?
Love is the foundation of our faith, of our beliefs, but it has no strength if we don’t actually practice it. We can talk about loving each others and even those we don’t know, but the reality is that love is an action and without bringing that action into every decision that we make we very easily find ourselves straying towards our own wants and needs instead of God’s. There is a great difficulty in doing that. It’s much easier to make our decisions based on what we believe is best for us and not on what is loving. Love often gets in the way of what we call a “logical decision”. Society teaches us that we need to look out for Number 1 to get anywhere and there’s alot of truth in that. Being concerned about everyone else makes their needs and goals more important than ours and you simply can’t build anything when you are thinking about how they feel or what they need. How can you “go big” and be explosive if you have to think about anything except your own goals?
The only problem is (and I say this in reference to any decision that we make) Christ told us to be loving above everything else. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do all things in love. It was his mantra, his main point. Why do we take the one thing that Jesus was trying to get into our heads and push it aside when it doesn’t fit our agendas?
This is where we are today. Are we going to love as Christ called us or are we just going to continue doing the same thing everyone else has been doing for hundreds of years? Are we going to think only of our own goals or are we really concerned about what Christ called us to do? It’s very difficult, this road that we have chosen. It causes us conflict at every step simply because it is not natural after living in the world that we do. We are to be in this world, not of it. We are to live here, but love this world in a way that the world has no capability of doing.
THIS is our calling. This is our direction. This is the future of whatever our church is to become.
May the rain pour and refresh us all….
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