It's the end of the school year! For a lot of us, that means our lives change because so much of our family schedule revolves around what our family members are doing in their classes, music, arts, and sports activities. For some of us, it happens to coincide with a change of season that means we can finally plant our gardens and enjoy the outdoors after nine months of not knowing what Ohio weather is going to look like. And for some, not much changes at all - we just keep doing what we always do, chipping away at the work at our job, the never-ending tasks of keeping and maintaining our homes, or, if we have found ourselves in difficult times because of medical, economic, or mental situations, the continuous cycle of trying to get help. Some of these repetitive tasks feel so daunting that I can’t help but wonder, “what’s the point?”
Part of my job follows the school year - many of my rehearsals and studies and things go on hiatus during the summer. At my last meeting today with one of my choirs, someone gave me a jar of honey from one of their own hives. Without any deep thought about it I felt it was a lovely gift, but as I reflected, I couldn’t help but wonder how few jars of honey he gets from each of his hives and that he gave me one of them! Then I thought about it from the bees’ perspective. They have the never-ending job of going out to find flowers and bringing pollen back to the hive so they can produce honey, all so someone can steal most of it away. They could easily do less work, live off of a smaller amount of honey, and then the beekeeper wouldn’t have any to take. But that isn’t who they are.
Ministry is like this, too. Our work doesn’t end. The needs of the world and God’s people don’t end. Spreading Jesus’ message doesn’t end. And sometimes we do a whole bunch of work and we’ve made a lot of people feel loved, only for some person or situation to come along and make them feel unloved again. We might boost someone up on Sunday morning and they go into a meeting on Monday morning and get yelled at, or they fail a school project and it tanks their self-esteem, or a classmate dies, or their friends drift away from them, or … the list goes on. It is so disheartening and it would be so easy to throw our hands up and say it is too hard and it isn’t worth doing so much work and having so little of the result last. We could just be happy to know God loves us and leave it at that and stop doing all the things we do every day to let everyone else know that God loves them, too. But that isn’t who we are.
At our Baptism we are given the name Christian, and we Affirm our Baptismal vows later during Confirmation. We not only promise that we are going to continue to do God’s work, but we affirm that being a Christian is who we are. Luckily, we find ourselves among many generations of Christians who have walked the same path and faced similar struggles, starting with the very first followers of Christ. Most of Paul’s letters are to people overcoming struggles that are difficult to imagine from our first-world, 21st century perspective. He reminded them to “... encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11) and “... be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).
What does being a Christian mean to you?
Yours in Christ,
John