On Being Human

God's timing is always impeccable; sometimes it's just more noticeable. Last week I wrote about the variety and fullness of the body of Christ. Today we found out that the Lord has called a couple from our church to somewhere else, most likely another church in the area. And after they have served for 25 years in our church, the loss is somewhat jarring.

I'll try not to maunder on, but I've been fighting the shock and carnal sense of betrayal all day. I know, in the spiritual sense, that we all owe obedience to Christ first, and the body and everything else secondly. Far be it from us to resist where God has called. My last post now seems prescient, because I need to remind myself that they are not renouncing the faith, or anything as tragic as that; they are simply going to a different part of the body of Christ. They're still family, just a bit more removed.

That is in the spiritual, but we are also flesh and often think much more of ourselves than we ought. Sometimes we forget that we do not sustain the church, God is certainly in charge of that; we merely facilitate and serve where He tells us to. This is the situation that ministers pray to avoid but inevitably endure. Regardless of the reason, and however benign, it is the human in us that makes ministers question their actions and brings recriminations. Did I do too much of that? Not enough of this? Did you feel unappreciated? Could I, in all my human insufficiency, have done anything differently to make you stay?

And yet . . . and yet . . . we understand the reasons, and applaud what must have been an agonizing decision to follow the will of God. And yet when you spend so much time with someone, and they pour out into you and the body, and you pour out into them, and serve and suffer and triumph and suffer again, something metaphysical happens. In the entangling of lives, people change and grow and become closer than brothers or sisters. Is it because we realize, perhaps subconsciously, that we are more than these physical manifestations? That perhaps these relationships in which we invest our time and emotions are spiritual? That spiritual things are eternal?

And when part of our spiritual body is pulled away, it hurts. There seems to be a hole now, in the congregation. Those particular seats are empty, this group is missing someone, that one is missing someone else. But it is the nature of things to heal, and holes fill up eventually. If we are like the grains of sand, when there is a hole in the sand, the ocean covers it and fills it up. New people will fill these holes. The body of Christ is varied and beautiful, and it is a pleasure to encounter the sheer diversity of our brothers and sisters. It's just, sometimes, there's pain and sadness in diversity too.