I didn't think it would be this soon

Like I said earlier today, I am reading Rob Bell's book and it is far out and beautiful and wonderful, and it kicked me in the teeth today.

He talks a lot about the church and what it should be and how we keep trying to contain it and market it and bottle it and sell it and grow it, but it's not about that... it is about the people. It is about being the body, and serving and giving and loving and standing with or better yet standing in place of. He makes many Eucharist references, but what hit me is that if we are to be the body...to be the Eucharist, we must be broken. That means we willingly offer ourselves up, like Jesus did, we make ourselves available to be the broken body of Christ, not just the strong muscular body that we envision. We like to imagine we are the big body parts, but weren't those the ones that are hardest hit at the crucifixtion? The hands, feet, arms, back, side, head...not a good day...to be those, you are going to get seriously effed up at times.

OK, so that is not even where I was going when I sat down here to write...I really wanted to focus on a line of the book. "The church is an organization that exists for the benefit of nonmembers." We are not here for us, we are here for them, gaining strength, gaining support, gaining friends, regrouping and recooperating, to go back out there for them. We are the front line outpost. We are there for the soldiers to come in and be replenished, rearmed, and redeployed. When we get nicked, we spend a little more time there recooperating, but when we are healthy, we are kicked in the butt to get back out there. In Hebrews it says they should continue to meet together so they can "consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds." Our services should be spurring us on, they should be sending us back out into battle, they should be kick-ass halftime speeches, not dreery, morbid sounding funerals of better times and easier circumstances.

Then the question is asked, "if our church were taken away from our city, our neighborhood, our community, our region - who would protest?" Surely the members, but would the nonmembers? The ones we should be there for in the first place? People would miss the rummage sale, but would they protest? This got me thinking about people taken from us too soon, Luke and Emily. They were and are sorely missed, and in some ways, isn't a funeral a type of protest? A way to say how much that person meant, that they are missed and loved - that they made a difference in your life. Those services were packed, packed by people whose lives had been touched - not just family members - but the nonmembers as well. The ones who were made to feel like members, like they belonged. The nurses, doctors, co-workers, those who were going about their normal routine lives and then - BOOM!!!!! - they got hit with this person who make his/her life about their lives. Who inspired not by trying to be inspriational, but by being the broken body of Christ. That God was seen in them and through them, not through their shouting and proclaiming His name (though that was done and is vitally important), but they aren't drawn in by the shouting and proclaiming, they are brought in by the actions of LIVING.

Would our church be missed? Are we being that body? Are we kicking the healthy back out into the battlefield to fight the good fight? Are we being broken and beaten but doing it for His name?

Then personally, would I be missed? By the nonmembers? Have I touched those lives? Have I lived that way? Would I be protested? And the answers are irrelevent...because I can change it, I can grow it, I can be it, I can show Him, I can live it, I can do it, I can be the joy of the Lord, I can blossom into the life that oozes Christ, because if I don't I am falling short of my calling...

Sinner Anonymous,
Isaac Morford