We gathered the other day for a marriage workshop, something our church has done annually for over a decade. Our own people run it and even furnish the content. The weeks leading up to it are typically filled with a lot of research, study, and consideration, to make sure the content is rewarding.
We shopped at Sam’s Club to throw a stellar breakfast and also catered an awesome barbecue luncheon.
When the big day hit, it didn’t disappoint. The presentations were full of inspiring testimonies, honest difficulties, and biblical wisdom.
We loved it.
Then it was over.
Another yearly event has passed. Now, we’re on to the next challenge, with its hopes, and plans.
But God’s people don’t mechanically serve the calendar. Our events and fellowship, meetings, and micro-groups are for a greater purpose. We’re supposed to be a people who gather and scatter, receive, and give.
One church I heard about posted a sign facing inward that you can only see when exiting their facility. It read, “You are now entering the mission field.” Of course, that was to be a reminder that the Christian life was never intended to be a life sequestered inside a meeting space.
Yes, we gather for encouragement, up-building, equipping. When that sweet time is over, we’re supposed to take the divine, spiritual, uncreated light we’ve received, out into the created light of the natural day. We use what we get. We live it out. We lean into the worldly necessities going on out there.
And so when our marriage workshop ended, my wife and I shared with each other on the car ride home bits and pieces of things people had said. We brought what we were given into our home. That’s the idea.
Then Sunday morning came. Someone on our teaching team brought the Word from an obscure text in the book of Jeremiah. We all bathed in that word, once again adoring the uncreated light of it, and kind of wishing we could just keep it up, right there, without ending.
But the clock struck noon. It was time to stop and bring out what we had gotten. My wife and I, per our regular Sunday afternoon, made visits and phone calls–people stuff, errands, and the like. It made me think about the way John described Jesus’s living and working in Galilee, that He “went about” (7:1). And in a sense, that was what we were doing.
This is the rhythm of the Christian meeting life. Not just to fill up endlessly, like a bottomless pit, but to top off, and then go get some mileage.
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This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Terren Hurst on Unsplash
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