The sun came out today after five days of forgetting what the sun felt like for us living in Lakewood, Ca. The better part of this past week has been washed by the falling sky and this sky collected in our streets and excited our gutters to overflow. It’s interesting to open your front door and see a river where you used to see a street. But today is different. The sun is out and the earth is dry. The air is warm and the breeze is but a whispering reminder of how she had stretched her lungs just the day before. But I don’t want to talk about today. I want to talk about yesterday.
Yesterday was an exciting day. It was the first time I had ever been in a Subaru Outback. I always thought they were great cars for outdoorsy people and now I was kind of living the day as one with my friend who really was one. “So this is all wheel drive all of the time?”, I asked while looking at the AWD logo on the dashboard. “Yep, there’s no way I can turn it off,” my friend answered. I felt like I could really sense all of the wheels pulling us along the concrete lanes of the 91 freeway as we made our way towards the San Bernardino Mountains. I couldn’t see the mountains through the pouring rain and swollen clouds, but I knew they would be there waiting for us.
As we drove we talked about a lot of things. It had been four months since I had seen my friend even though we live only twenty minutes away from each other. He began to share with me how isolated he had been feeling. He had been to a few churches in his area, but they left him frustrated. He told me how this one pastor of a very large church ended his sermon by asking people who wanted to believe in Jesus Christ to stand up and pray together with him. This was fine, but the pastor had everyone in attendance close their eyes and not look around during this time, as if to say that believing in Jesus is something shameful and those who believe in Him would only publicly profess their belief if there was nothing public about their professing. My friend walked away saddened and frustrated by this poor treatment of Christ and the Gospel. A new member of the family should be celebrated.
He says most of the churches in his area are seeker sensitive, which means they sway back and forth with the cultural trends in order to get more bodies in their buildings. These churches say they aren’t changing the message, just repackaging. The thing is, the message should be love. Love isn’t something that needs to be repackaged. It’s something that need to be done. Anyone who begins to grasp the love of Jesus and what He has done for humanity won’t be ashamed to follow Him.
We kept driving up these windy mountain roads and were soon thousands of feet high and wheel deep in snow. Then things started to happen. They weren’t major things, but just little things. We worked together to put chains on the car; one of us guiding the chains under each wheel as the other rolled the car forward. Then we almost kept driving down a wrong road when one of us realized this and brought it up in casual conversation. The last of these things happened when we were stuck in a line of cars. I told my friend that he could make a U-turn right where we were at to get out of this line and get us back on our way. I said he could easily make it and to just plow into some snow if he had to. He made the U-turn which ended up being something of a 5 point turn on the narrow snowplowed road, and we were on our way. I didn’t realize that all of these things were in fact things until he raised up his hand for a high five and said, “Thanks for the encouragement!”, then started to wonder out loud where we would be if we weren’t there together. I didn’t know where we’d be, but I did know that we were there together and these things I’ve been talking about are some of the reason why we, as in all believers, should be together and work to be together.
Just like the four wheels of the all wheel drive Subaru Outback, we were not designed to be isolated, but designed to be together, to work together, helping to regain traction if one of us is slipping. Just like the massive amounts of rain that together speak of the awesome power of the storm we were in, Jesus says that when His followers are unified in love as He is unified with God in Heaven, that we together speak of the awesome truth that Jesus is the Son of God through the unity and love we display with and for each other. We were made to live this life together and to move towards the unseen together. The unseen being the glory of God and His Kingdom that is waiting to welcome us home, kinda like the beautiful snow capped San Bernardino mountains, but better.
