Skeletons and Community

We get up in the morning and we open our closets. We shove our skeletons in for safe keeping and grab our finest clothes. We shower, shave and get dressed to kill. We paste a smile on our face and venture out into the world, headed to church to show how good we are. We don’t want to be contaminated, we don’t want others to see we have some residue we forgot to remove. We purr so sweetly when asked how we are, as we shake with fright that someone just might see past our facade, and know that we are fake!

Over the last year I’ve had a chance to learn how much I appreciate church. As a young person, I used my Sabbath as a true day of rest from my labors, but it included sleeping most of the day. Later in life I attended church most weeks. Lately, my work schedule only allows me to attend every other week, and I miss my weekly church visits. I miss my community!

I’d like to pause this train of thought and apologize to Alex Bryan and all my pastoral friends in advance if I offend. While I enjoy the spiritual food I receive on the weeks I attend, I fear we have taken what church should be for granted! Not to say that the Pastor’s message isn’t important, it is, but that is not what church is for. We were called to be a community. A community who supports each other through thick or thin, in good times and bad. Instead, we soldier on, bearing our own burdens in silence because we are afraid of what others might think. How crazy!

Too many people view church as performance theater instead of the spiritual hospital that it is! We try to look right, act right, and talk right, so we can prove that we are right. But we are not right! We all have skeletons in our closets. We have all made mistakes. We are all battered, bruised and broken!

This view that church is for good, perfect people is such a horrible warping of what, I believe God intended! Church isn’t a museum, it’s a hospital. It makes no sense to expect someone to come to church and suddenly be perfect. If I take someone into the Emergency Room with a serious illness or injury, we don’t expect them to get up and walk out that same day perfectly healthy. So why do we expect that of broken people when they go to church?

Life is hard, messy and overwhelming. People are broken, dirty and searching for support. We owe it to each other to be there and to support each other through life’s challenges. We need to be real with each other. We need to willing and lovingly call BS on our friends when they need it, and carry them when they can’t walk through the valley of darkness. We need to be God’s heart and hands on this earth. We need to be community for each other!

Everyone has skeletons in their closet. Almost everyone hides those skeletons. Maybe we should make an effort to be real with each other. Maybe we should take our skeletons out of the darkness of our closets, into the light, and dance with them. It just might make us a little more real. It just might make us a little bit more understanding and empathetic. It just might help us help each other.

Sunlight illuminates the dark places. Sunlight kills bad stuff. So grab your skeletons and dance with me. And in the process, let’s be someone’s community!