Kids are getting ready to go back to school. Pumpkins are turning orange. The grass is all dried up and brown from not having rain all summer. Basically, the sun is setting on our 2014 summer. You might be sad about that.
But not me!
I love fall! And it’s not just because I love football. What I love about fall is that everyone starts getting back into a routine. Vacations come to an end. The busyness of summer schedules slows down. And…
Everyone goes back to church!
I think family is important, and I think it’s important to spend time with family. My family just got back from vacation. It’s a good thing to do.
But what isn’t good, is to forget about your spiritual family for extended periods of time. And that’s one reason I don’t like summer.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, when you’re not with the body God has placed you in, and if you’re reading this, that most likely means you’re a part of the SixEight body, it hurts the body to not have you around. When parts of the body are missing, the rest of the body has to compensate.
It’d kind of like getting hurt or sick. When you pull a muscle in your back, your legs, neck and other parts of your body have to work harder to make up for the work that your back isn’t able to do. When you get sick, your whole body reduces how much energy it uses and diverts that energy into fighting the disease.
When we go for long periods of time without you, everyone else has to work harder.
So What?
It’s not just hard on others, it’s bad for you.
Let’s take the example of when a bone breaks. Say you break your arm. You put the broken part into a cast until the bone has had enough time to heal. But what happens to the rest of your arm? Your muscles shrink, they get tight and atrophy. They actually get used to being in the wrong position, and you have to retrain them to do what they are supposed to do.
How does that affect me? Well, the muscles that support that bone grow weak. So, they aren’t able to compensate for the break like they would have been able to early on. Which increases the chances of more damage or rebreaking the bone in the same place again.
We are all members of one body, and we all belong to each other. When one member breaks, the supporting structure has to compensate. When one member is missing for an extended period of time, the supporting structure has to relearn and remember what they knew how to do before the break. So any additional progress is going to be slowed down because we have to spend time remembering things.
Still, so what? What that means is the parts of the body that are supposed to be there to support you and help you, are weakened because they’ve been missing your presence. So, if you need help, the body isn’t used to supporting you, and it isn’t going to be prepared to help you when you need it the most.
Here’s my hope for us:
I hope we’ll all start coming back to church this coming Sunday. Yes, I know this Sunday is labor day weekend. But you know what, it’s supposed to rain so you might as well be in church anyway. And I’m not just hoping that so we can feel good about having a good attendance. I’m hoping that because I hope we’ll be there for one another in the way we are told to be there in the Bible.
If you’ve forgotten:
Romans 12:4-5
4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
1 Cor. 12:26
“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
Will you join us this Sunday and help make us whole again?