Part of our wilderness journey included isolation and loneliness. Noone's fault in particular, except maybe life, but there were many contributing factors. Although our previous move brought us much closer to family (2 hours instead of 24), we struggled to make the intimate relationships with friends that we had experienced in every other location we had lived.
Small town life where people are content to keep to themselves combined with our own natural hermit tendencies made living life together with other brothers and sisters in Christ seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Add to that the birth of our first child who refused to take a pacifier or allow anyone else to take care of her other than one of her people, and we ended up living holed up in a bunker being suffocated by the desire just to share our life with others.
We were meant to live in community. It is in the sequence of our Christian DNA. Not a choice or a preference, but a God-designed condition. Period. We are His Body made of many parts, His Family full of many members, and His House built with many living stones.
As Frank Viola states, "One of the great problems in the Christian faith today, I believe, is that Christians are taught to be salt and light in the world as individuals. We are exhorted as individuals to change the world for Christ. We are motivated as individuals to be agents of God's kingdom."
"'Church' has be redefined as the place you attend to be educated and motivated to go out and live a better individual Christian life. Sadly, the individual emphasis in comtemporary Christianity has overwhelmed and eclipsed God's central purpose, which is corporate. To compound the trouble, we have been handed individualistic lenses by which to read, study, and interpret in the Bible."
"Please observe that is is not the individual Christian who is the fullness of Christ. It is the church, the ekklesia. Also observe that the vast majority of the Bible was written to a people, not an individual. That includes your New Testament, the bulk of which was written to Christian communitites."
"Our new species lives, works, and behaves in community. We are a colony together. Thus the great need of the hour is for Christians to begin learning how to gather together and embody Christ in a shared-life community where we live. The Christian life is not about you or me. It's about us. And that is the church."
And so after numerous years of religious detox and lonely isolation, God, in His infinite mercy, has now lovingly brought us to the Pools of Bethesda, a place of healing. He even saw fit to include guardian angels as our across the street neighbors. They are an elderly couple who have been extremely kind to us and have been loving on our little family. We needed to be loved upon. We needed to live in community with other believers.
We went to church and a picnic with them a few Sundays ago and were truly blessed by the experience and the company. We see and talk to them at least once a day "as we go," and it has been so good to find community outside the church walls. Already in a few short weeks, we are building more intimacy with those around us than we did in years of "attending church" in our previous town.
Exalting Jesus while sharing life with others satisfies a need knit in the very fabric of my being so much more so than looking at the back of someone's head for an hour every week, stopping to answer the obligatory "How are you's" in the hallway before rushing out the door, and sitting in a circle during Sunday School for a specified amount of time no matter what the Spirit may have in mind.
One other interesting by-product of our time detoxing in the wilderness and healing in Bethesda is as a recovering Pharisee that found security in a specific denomination's doctrine (see previous post), I am now thoroughly comfortable in fellowship and worship with my precious brothers and sisters from various Christian backgrounds/denominations. What a beautiful gift. We are one in Christ, truly. May you find it so in your life as well.
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(DISCLAIMER: I'm on pain medication so if my thoughts seem more organized and make more sense than normal, you can thank the Hydrocodone.)
Initial reactions to this post could be wide-ranging (and have been). I have traveled/wondered with Misty on this journey and I know the thoughts in her mind (as much as a man can know the thoughts of a woman…). I’ve read the books she has read (mostly, still trying to catch up there too!) and have seen and felt all the emotions, wounds and hurts that this journey (in the wilderness) has rendered upon us.
So, as the middle child who always wants people to get along and trying to find solutions to make that happen, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it would be like to have somebody tell me that my pools of Bethesda was a wilderness. Can it be true that a place of healing is also a lonely wilderness place? I believe it can. It has to be.
But how long do you tarry at the pool?
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