are you growing fuzz?

So for most of you, this won't be that big a deal. This is more for the my younger friends who haven't grown up in the place I did. (So mostly my youth group probably) Some of you don't know, and some of you do, but there has been what we'll call a major pothole in the road that has left the car broken down on the side of the road. I can't give you all the details yet, and honestly, this probably isn't the place for that. Ask me if you want to know. But, we'll say we've had a friend let us down, and it has hit a whole group of us very hard. And we'll never see this person again most likely, not to mention what their life will look like. He pretty much destroyed his life, and many of our friends have taken shrapnel from it.

And we're grieving, and it's hard, and it sucks, but the thing that has me struck is the issue of community & integrity. This thing makes me wonder, if we were in a place where we could all be brutally honest with each other, would this thing have looked different? If this buddy of ours had a place to be transparent and open with someone, ANYone, could this have played out different?

And I see this in our group too. Our group is fragmented. Our church is fragmented, and we're trying to unlearn what we see, though it's hard to break free of this. We better than we used to be, but there are still cliques that need to die. Relationships that need to change, some that need to be opened up, some that need to start at all.

Think of the question this way: If the goal of us following Jesus is to be fully alive, can we be fully alive if we're not fully known?

This is why I am thinking about this stuff. We need community, and REAL community. A place where we can share our struggles, our joys, our pains, our temptations, our loves, our passions. We're all friends, and we know things that we like to do, places we like to go, but do we know each others struggles? What pains does your friend carry that you know about? Do you think there are some that you don't know about? Do you carry things that no one knows about?

Do you know what happens when we don't share those things with each other? They go unchecked. And when they go unchecked, they fester. That festering grows into something worse than what it was. Sort of like when you leave juice outside in the bottle for a long time. At first it just smells, but as it goes unchecked, it starts to smell worse. Soon it starts to turn color, and it grows fuzz. And then next thing you know, you've got a tiny little bit of juice with a BIG, HUGE, GREEN & BLACK patch of moss on top of it. And if you were to drink it, it would make you horribly sick, if not kill you. If you drink enough of the moldy mossiness, it will kill you.

So the question is, do you want to leave things unchecked?

Here's my fear, and I feel like there's a level of truth to this, because I feel like I've seen it play itself out before, but here it is: If all of us leave things unchecked for whatever reason - fear, shame, guilt, embarrassment - they will fester. And if that happens in a group of people, then we're a group of festering people. And on the one hand, that's the Church, a group of sick people. But, are we trying to get better? Are we staying in our festered state? If we stay put and let the mold grow and run it's course, we'll die. And our group will die. Our church will die.

We have to fight for our hearts. We have to fight for our lives. For our group. And that starts with community. So, where do you go from here? You can get sicker if you want, or you can fight. Fight the sickness. Rebel against your own indifference. Scream into your apathy that you're not going to stay put. Shine light in dark places.

And in that, may we find hope. And know that love is deeper and bigger than our pains and struggles.

live deeper...