Investing in Your Soul

 Belonging is a basic need of every person. To belong to a social club, you must perform, pay dues, work. To belong to any interest club you must be able to participate in the activities. Each group we belong to, from little league to chess club, requires our focus and time doing the activity that ties it together. At some point we will age out and life will take us on to a new group. Church is the one group in which we can’t age out and we must not perform to belong. But this is not the reason to attend church.

Church is a place to nurture your soul. We spend our days denying even having a soul and essentially starve it until mourning the loss of a loved one reminds us of the most important part of our being. We neglect nurturing our souls and it shows in our society. We need to tend to this most important part of our God-given life. Our children need to be taught of the existence of our soul and how to feed it. It is through good churches that we learn this. No place else gives us this food for our soul. Church plays a vital role that we often choose to overlook until it is too late.

I am too busy for church. I have so many boxes to check off during the week and church is just one more. Yes, attending church takes time but it is time invested, versus time wasted. That is a huge difference! Spending my time catching up on work or sleep versus spending time in church is the difference in renting and buying. It is the difference in junk food and fine cuisine. It is the difference in time spent building sand castles versus building a house. Yes, it takes my precious time. But the time will pass whether I use it wisely or not.

Maybe you are like me and have a picture of a church planted in your head. In my picture, the church is small and busy. It is Wednesday night choir practice while children chase fireflies on the front lawn. It is a short distance from my house. It is a place where everybody knows my name(like Cheers). They sing old gospel hymns and have amazing picnics.

But that is a picture from 1968. It is a memory. It is not reality. I have to let go of my image of a church in order to learn a new church; one that fits in the twenty-first century. Yes, there are still small local churches. But more often we see mega-churches where nobody knows your name and are a long road trip from your house. There is such a learning curve to belong to one of these monsters! It takes persistence and time to “belong” to one of these churches especially for introverts like me. But before you choose to join any church, here are a few questions you should ask yourself.

Is this church focused on Christ? Does this church pray and pray often? Does this church inspire you to learn more about God? Are members maturing as Christians through the guidance of this church? Does this church look like the community it serves or is everyone there about the same in age, race, and socioeconomic status? Do I have a desire to help this church in any capacity?

If you are currently a member of a church that you seldom attend and it is one more chore to check off the list, please consider making a change. Something is wrong. This is not what the church was meant to be. Not all churches are the same. The focus of the church should be Christ. If it is not, then it is another (rather deceptive) social club. There are many churches out there and there is no rule saying that you can’t visit them. It may take years to find your church family but every minute is worth it. Church is an investment in your soul and the time and trouble to find a church is far outweighed by the benefits to your soul.

You Are Never Too Old for Stories

 I love stories! If you ever went to Sunday School as a small child, you heard Bible stories. They were often accompanied by ancient pictures hung so high around the classroom that you must tilt your head way back to see them. I guess that was to keep our grimy fingers off of them. The lucky ones of us attended a church where they had a flannel-graph of the characters and the child who was most trusted got to stick the character on the flannel board when the teacher gave them the ok.

Then at some point we aged out of Bible stories and flannel-graphs. I don’t know who decided this. Maybe they just ran out of G-rated stories for littles since most Bible stories are definitely of the rougher variety. When I was a teen going to church, I loved it when I got to listen to an animated version of a Bible story told by an inspired youth director. They were so enthusiastic that they often included choreography which was frowned upon in my church. As an adult, I must admit that I still love an artfully told Bible story in the sermon. It takes me back to the time and place in which it was written and gives me a new understanding of a story I have heard a hundred times before.

As you can tell, I was privileged to hear the Bible through many different folks. In my daddy’s final years of life he told me that it was Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible by Dr. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut that led him to know Christ. Dad later became a minister. He told me that his mom used the scant money she had to buy this book from a door-to-door salesman. This would have been in the 1930’s(almost 100 years ago!). Dad said he devoured that book. It contained 168 stories of a continuous narrative from Genesis to Revelation.

Sometimes I feel that we ruined the Bible when we divided it into chapters and verses that can be quickly plucked out of time and cultural setting and posted on social media. The essence is lost and it becomes a weapon to reinforce our point of view. I believe the Bible was meant to be read as stories and not as a rule book or as history lessons and definitely not in individual verses plucked out of context, although I have been guilty of all of this.

Knowing the setting of a story is vital, yet somehow these stories transcend time and place and touch our hearts today. They take us into worlds we can never know and teach us lessons from other cultures and timeframes. Just as every book or movie must first introduce us to the cultural mores before it tells us the story, so must those Bible stories. And I can’t help but think that this is the correct way to read the Bible. We must step back into the strange traditions and rituals of the time when the story took place to truly understand it. For example, look at the ever-popular story of Daniel in the lion’s den. If we did not understand Daniel’s backstory and his heritage and the traumatizing events that took him to this strange land, we would not be getting the full story. And if we didn’t get the full story we would be missing out on much of the application to our own lives.

Reading the Bible without any knowledge of the culture is not really reading for understanding. It is an eyeball exercise in piety. The Bible is uniquely recorded by people from different centuries, cultures, socio-economic status and careers; including everything from kings to fishermen and felons to prophets. And the various characters include slaves, beautiful queens, hookers, virgins and eunuchs. The attitudes encompass everything from gratitude to bitterness and anger. The stories are so riveting that they are the stuff of movies like The Ten Commandments and the beautifully inspired stories in the series called The Chosen. Maybe it is time for us to take a trip through time and re-visit those ancient stories. And we need to do this in a most delightful way. Enjoy the journey.