It’s been raining. A lot.
A drainpipe backed up, so that water came into the church basement. A lot.
On the newly laid flooring in our soon-to-be remodeled Fellowship Hall, through the kitchen, down the hallway, into the computer lab and the bathrooms. There was a great weeping and gnashing of teeth. Ugh.
I suppose I could use this space for a devotional comparing the drainpipe to our hearts, and how we need to flush our hearts—like a drain pipe—if we want the Holy Spirit to flow through us.
Yeah, yeah? No. The metaphor falls flat.
Instead, I want to devote these words to a celebration of church community. I want to write about the woman who took time away from her husband to help me mop, and about the dad who wet vacced the carpeting, and the Building & Grounds guys who showed up to inspect the new flooring and sigh relief that their hours and hours of work had stood the test of last week’s storms.
I want to write about the others who came early to worship the next Sunday morning when the water came in again. How they mopped again and wet vacced again and inspected again.
None of it felt like holy work at the time. It felt like an annoyance and a worry. We bore it together, though, and we did it for the sake of a church family that continues to strive forward for Jesus despite the setbacks of these last three years. We keep coming together and loving God and succeeding (most of the time…) to love each other and push each other forward to the Kingdom while serving our community and the world. We’ve got our youth group serving the poor this week in Wisconsin. On Saturday, we’ll help the city clean up. In a couple of weeks, five of us will head to southern Mexico to build water cisterns. We’ll keep showing up, here or where we’re needed, whenever we can.
”For the body does not consist of one member but of many,” wrote the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 12:14). None of us could do life along. We do it together.
Last week, Tish Harrison Warren published her interview with Eboo Patel of Interfaith America. He’s a sort of head cheerleader for faith communities, from little churches to big mosques, from suburban synagogues to urban meditation centers. Why do these communities matter? “Our society relies on religious communities,” he told her, “to take care of people, to do addiction counseling, to do job training, to do hunger and homelessness work, to do refugee settlement” (here).
And, for us, to tell the good news of Jesus for all to hear. Even if it takes a wet vac to do it.
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