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Commitment in a World Without Front Porches (We all need people to help hold our arms up) |
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We all need people to help hold our arms up. Where support, encouragement, and accountability work together to build a lifetime of faithfulness. Not part-time Christianity, but a full-time faith. Fully engaged, transformational, moment-by-moment, living covenant, authentic community. |
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| Author: Derek Maul |
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A group of us gathered in the banquet hall, chatting about the event, sharing stories and talking about our kids. Lynn, our church’s youth director, gestured toward the far end of the long table, where ten of her former protégés huddled together, enjoying each other’s company again now they are young adults.
We smiled at the tableau and then shared our concerns about the world these young people now inhabit. What will they do without the tight-knit community they left behind? Their faith and their values were reinforced by a host of friends and family, but then they dispersed into the world—a place where community does not occur naturally and where a living faith is countercultural.
Not only did they head out on their own, but immediately they took on huge commitments. It worries us parents; we can’t help ourselves. Because it seems like we’ve created this world without front porches, a place where people move away from support structures and live outside of community, a world where we’re all more vulnerable to failed commitments than ever before.
It turns out, ironically, that the very things Americans profess to value so highly— marriage, family, freedom, homes, and our “comfortable” lifestyle—all require a high level of commitment. At the same time, faithfulness, loyalty, and the keeping of promises continue to fall both in popularity and practice.
What I long to see—not only for these young adults but for all of us—is a culture where commitment is valued, faithfulness pays off, accountability is built into the fabric of relationships, and healing is offered as a routine intervention when people begin to struggle.
Biggest Loser
There’s a popular television show where most of the above happens. It’s called The Biggest Loser. The goal of the series is sustained weight loss, increased fitness, and balanced health. Participants train together, cheer each other on, celebrate success, and cry with fellow contestants when things go south.
Later, as the numbers are whittled down, men and women who had done well on the show struggle to sustain their healthy habits at home. Without exception they all agree how tough it is to keep commitments and to maintain a steady course when they’re not part of a community that works hard to hold them up.
The dynamics of The Biggest Loser demonstrate the tangible power of support and encouragement. We all could use a few cheerleaders every now and then, and we also need some other people to get involved in our promise keeping. We all could use some help to abandon this culture’s cult of individualism—a community of fellow strugglers when we need a little boost to follow through.
Such transformational community also describes the church—or at least it illustrates the way Jesus was thinking about connectivity. He said the following words to his friends at their last dinner together. “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5, NRSV).
People (me, you, we) need community, especially when it comes to keeping faith and honoring our commitments. It’s been said that most of the worthwhile things in life come at a price, that they’re not easy. It’s also true to say that worthwhile things don’t come without the critical need to follow through.
Marriage is challenging; it’s tough to hold on to all those promises, consistently, for 10, 20, 30, 40, and more years. Homes come with mortgages; that’s every month, regardless, often for 30 years. Children are an ever-mounting responsibility; both joys and costs can last a lifetime. Society requires funding, services, schools, financial stability, commitments, solvency, fidelity, and the ability to stay the course over time.
How can we possibly enjoy all this to the fullest possible extent without the support, encouragement, teaching, and accountability that is found with an active community of faith? How can we possibly keep this ship afloat without holding ourselves accountable, coming alongside one another, and finding encouragement when it’s hard to keep our promises?
People to hold our arms up
One of my favorite Old Testament stories comes from the book of Exodus. God told Moses to keep his hands stretched toward heaven during a long battle. But the great Hebrew leader’s hands grew tired. Every time he lowered them, things went badly. Finally his friends helped out. Here’s the passage: “Moses’ hands grew weary; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; so his hands were steady until the sun set” (Exodus 17:12).
I believe we all need people to help hold our arms up.
There’s a sense in which Christ anticipated all of this when he called his friends to live together in that kind of self-giving love. That’s what we were all thinking about at the wedding, watching two young people launch themselves into a lifetime of promises. We were thinking about the kind of community where support, encouragement, and accountability work together to build a lifetime of faithfulness. We were thinking about what we enjoy here, through our community of faith.
Not part-time Christianity, but a full-time faith. Fully engaged, transformational, moment-by-moment, living covenant, authentic community.
About Author
Derek Maul, an AMY award–winning news columnist, is the author of three books published by Upper Room Books: Get Real: A Spiritual Journey for Men, In My Heart I Carry a Star: Stories for Advent, and The Unmaking of a Part-time Christian. His writing has been featured in the Tampa Tribune, Newsweek, USA Today, Guideposts magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Christian Science Monitor, Presbyterians Today, and The Presbyterian Outlook, as well as several international devotional publications.
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