What do we hold on to?
Blog post by Matt McCoy
3 minute read
There are several different ways to ask the same BIG fundamental question:
How do we live our best possible life?
What’s the secret to happiness?
How do I live my best life now?
What makes for a truly great community?
How can I find contentment in my life?
How can I draw closer to my family and friends?
This is how I began my first blog in this season, waaaaay back in June. And one of the things we discovered in that blog was that Jesus often sends us unexpected and overlooked people to disciple us in order to answer those questions. Which is SO WEIRD in contrast to what we hear in the culture around us, which tends to celebrate leaving unexpected and overlooked people alone. If you’d like to read that whole blog again, you can find it here.
We then explored how our culture likes to equate Jesus and Mr. Rogers as being the most super nice person anyone can imagine. But in reality, Mr. Rogers risked getting fired for being honest with children about death, war, divorce, racism, and the assassination of political leaders. And Jesus was killed by the authorities. We like focusing on the things they did that were nice, and we like overlooking the things they did that were very, very hard to do. And so, if we’re going to welcome overlooked and invisible people, we have to be a church that’s good for hurting people who hurt people, which means we have to be willing to follow Jesus into the broken places in life. If you’d like to read that whole blog again, you can find it here.
And then we dove into multiple stories of Jesus interacting with unexpected people and treating them as friends. And we were led by multiple teachers from Spring Church.
When we read these stories, we didn’t imagine ourselves as being in the role of Jesus, because that’s usually a terrible and creepy way to read the Bible. And we didn’t linger on imagining ourselves as being in the role of the unexpected friend. While that’s important to do, especially when it comes to experiencing the radical grace, healing, and friendship of Jesus, we didn’t stay there too long. Answering those big questions at the beginning of this blog (and at the beginning of this series) requires us to experience the grace, healing, and friendship of Jesus and then return to the neighborhood. The places where we live, work, go to school, play, and worship. That neighborhood is represented by “the crowd” in these stories.
When we imagine ourselves as a part of the crowd, we realize that ‘living our best life now’ isn’t motivating enough to be friends with the sort of unexpected people who Jesus hung out with. We discover that ‘being my best self’ isn’t good enough to be kind to the sort of people who Jesus spent time with. We learn that we’re repulsed with the idea of eating next to the sort of people who Jesus ate next to. Jesus isn’t inviting us into doing our best. Jesus is inviting us into being transformed.
Only the Holy Spirit can bring about the sort of transformation that will enable me to be friends with the sort of unexpected friends who Jesus had.
Jesus said an oppressor had more faith than the oppressed. Jesus ate with the sort of backstabbing traitors who I hate being around. Jesus slowed everyone down and gave the microphone to the least qualified.
Spring Church can’t be a community that is good for hurting people who hurt people without the Holy Spirit bringing our lives together. And so, every other week, we got together in our Heading North small group and explored how we might participate in how the Holy Spirit transforms us into being able to live the sort of ‘best life now that Jesus invites us into.
Daily prayers written by Spring Church Community at Heading North Small Groups
This coming Sunday is our service of remembering, and we’ll be led by Bruce in one more spin around this carousel that has become familiar through this summer and fall.
We’ll get one more chance to look at these stories, describe why the person Jesus was spending time with is unexpected, and look at how the crowd reacted to them. We’ll then get one more chance to imagine ourselves in the crowd, and have one more chance to feel the ‘impossibility’ of us being friends with these sorts of people on our own. And Bruce will conclude by giving us one more chance to discern how we might, as a community, be transformed by the Holy Spirit as we encounter unexpected friends in our ordinary, everyday lives.
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