Sitting in the Dirt

Many of us go through the tough times in life without anyone to walk with us. There are multiple reasons that this happens. We are embarrassed to be in a situation so we don’t let anyone know. We are too confident in our own ability so we keep trying to do it ourselves. We keep friendships at a distance afraid of getting too close to anyone with the reality our life. Maybe it falls under not wanting to be rejected; maybe it’s that we are too proud and independent to ask for help. Maybe it’s just that there isn’t anybody around us willing to be there! Whatever the case may be there are many of us who go through tough times alone.

This need not be. This shouldn’t be – especially in the church.

Jesus asked the Father in John 17 to make the relationships of His people the same as the relationship between Him and His Father. They are one. They are interacting with unity of purpose and thinking. Just prior to this prayer He had taught His disciples that the only way that those who do not know God will know who God’s people are is by the love they see that they have for one another.

I think we’re missing it.

Church life, as we have come to know it, has leaned toward programmatic and away from relational. It’s no longer a culture, under the leading of the Holy Spirit, of people caring for one another and being there with one another and taking care of one another. We have left that up to church programs to do that for us.

We let the calendar choose when we get together. We find an addicting sense of comfort in the weekly schedule of meetings and have adjusted our priorities from looking after our neighbor to being in attendance at our church meetings. We write a check and place it in the benevolence envelope so that the people who take care of that sort of thing can do it for us. I have found that we spend more time inviting people “to church” than we do sitting with them at their table.

Now, I know that it is important to gather together as a congregation to worship, to encourage, and to strengthen each other in our faith. The Bible says that we should not forsake the gathering of ourselves together and so much the more as we see the days getting closer to Jesus’ return. (Hebrews 10:25) What I do not see anywhere in the gospels is where Jesus placed the agenda of the temple or synagogue over the needs of the people. Just the opposite in fact!

Reading through the first two chapters of Job sort of rocked our world this weekend. Job was in so much pain and suffering, he had lost so much, his business was gone, his kids and employees were dead, and thinking about his future was futile. His health had been afflicted to the point where he had nothing left to do each day but to grieve and try and stay alive.

When his close friends heard of the deep suffering he was in they came right away. As they approached him they didn’t even recognize him for the pain he was in and the disease that was covering his body. They were not afraid. The singer/songwriter, Sara Groves, has a line in one of her songs that says, “I am not afraid of you” while she is asking to sit with her friend and hear the story of their life. The Bible says that when Job’s three friends got to him they just sat down in the dirt with him and no one said a word for seven days and seven nights for there were no words for such suffering.

Like we said on Sunday; the church today has more congregations, more pastors and teachers, more youth workers that are trying to be relevant to their generation, more Bible colleges, more scholars, more summer programs and mission adventures, more weekly prayer meetings, more Sunday meetings than ever before in the history of the church. But what we have gotten away from is having a friend that will sit in the dirt of your life with you when life gets hard and the pain is unbearable and the unthinkable has just happened.

We were not meant to do life alone, who are we sitting in the dirt with this week?

Pastor Mike