Have you ever walked into an old room that you haven't been in in a while, or that no one has been in in a while? What's it smell like? What does it look like? Are their signs of life there? Are you worried about what signs of life you might find, like the creepy crawly kind?
Now that you have that room in mind, have you ever done something with a room like that? Have you ever walked in to one and cleaned it up, fixed some of the broken pieces, renovated it to be used again? What does that feel like when you get it finished?
It's a pretty great accomplishment when you're done isn't it? It feels good, it looks good, and now maybe its ready for the next generation.
Sometimes, we need to be reminded that behind old musty doors, that there is still something special waiting there.
This is the second post in a series I'm calling "Our Daily Bread," because what we're trying to do is not answer questions like, "how do we fix the church?" or "how do we fix other people?" or "how do we make church a priority again?" When we look at the church, and we are trying to do something new, to be prepared for the next generation, those are the questions we have a tendency to look at. Those are the questions that we think we have to answer.
They aren't the ones that we want. What we're looking for, and what we need to understand is that what we do should be so ingrained into us that we naturally do it every day. We do it not because we're trying to save someone or something, but because that is who we are.
This is the line from the Lord's prayer that is sticking with me through this series. How do we, as a church, as a community of faith, go to God and say, "give us this day, our daily bread"?
This is why I like the image of the waterwheel. To have bread means that there has been a lot that has taken place before then. Most importantly, there had to be something that ground the wheat to make the flour that gives us our bread. The bread is what we need to not just survive, but to thrive.
We're looking for the effort that goes into turning the waterwheel (flywheel), to produce what we need. And we know what we want to do. That's the line I'm using as a description for this series, "to build momentum to build faith in our lives and the lives of others." That's just for this series. As a church and denomination, or mission is that same thing:
To make that happen, we have to get started. You can't build anything without starting. It takes effort to build. Building means that we're doing something more than just surviving too. We aren't looking to just survive, but to thrive. Once we're moving its a lot easier, but we have to get started.
We look to see how God shows us how to do this. One of the great things that Jesus does is that he builds community wherever he goes. We looked at this in the previous post. Jesus builds a special kind of community. He builds communities that are inclusive. They are defined by the fact that they include other people, and most of the time it's people that have been excluded by others. When they have included one group, then they default into looking for the next group to include.
This doesn't come without it's challenges. It means that things will change. Anytime that you introduce new people to a community things will change. As our community expands, it will be different than it was before. That's the nature of things. But the truth is that things have always changed. We are not the same as we were 20 years ago. We've changed in that time.
The thing that we can do, and that is important that we do, is that we can choose. We can choose who to lead us. We choose Jesus Christ to lead. We know that he is the one who has the our best interests in mind because of the love that he shows to us.
That doesn't mean that things will be easy, but it means that he will prepare, strengthen, encourage, and lead us in this journey.
As we look at how we expand our community, we're going to look into different places to expand into. Through this post and the next one, I'm going to ask you to go to different places to see them and the people there in a new way.
For this post we're looking at how Ezekiel does this same thing.
The story in Ezekiel 37 could be one that fit into the Stranger Things series that I did a while back. That comes from a very specific question that God asks.
God is asking a question that he already has the answer too, but he asks it because Ezekiel needs it to be asked. He needed to be ready to hear the answer, so God asks him, "can these bones live again?"
Ezekiel was looking out at a barren place in Israel's history. Both the northern and southern kingdom's had fallen, and they had been sent into exile. He's looking at a lost history and vitality of his people, and the hopelessness that comes with it. He wants to know, can they live again?
When we look at the old musty rooms that have been forgotten with time, we remember what was there. We remember who lived in them, and maybe even all the different transitions that it went through. Can it be brought back to life? Can we look to forgotten places and see something new?
God responded to Ezekiel with this.
God says the same thing to us. Those old forgotten rooms, those old forgotten places, can have new life. They don't have to stay that way. They can bring health and vitality, faith and life, happiness and joy to a new place. In them, faith can be built in our lives and in the lives of others.
We have to know what effort is required to open those closed doors. God's kingdom starts in the forgotten places and with forgotten people. Its starts with valleys of dry bones and closed off rooms. Are we ready to open the door to a new place?
The Flywheel Point starts with a question. Every community has forgotten places. Those are the places that maybe you haven't been in a while, that you have literally forgotten were there. In response to this post, I want you to find one of those places and go take a walk or a drive through them.
But remember the rest of the point. When I say that it is forgotten, that's by us. There are people that are still there and have been there. They have managed through without us. They don't need us to come in and fix things. That's not how we build community. What they need, is to know that we are here and that we're in this together. That's the place to start.
Then you ask God a question. How can he use you? How can he use our church? Those are very different questions than what can we fix. But those are the questions that we need.
Go out this week and find an old forgotten door to walk through, and when you do, seek God's guidance to use you to build his community and his kingdom. And go and do this in Jesus' name, Amen.
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