(you were salt)
Years and years ago a person told me the only way they’d found to survive vocational ministry was to have their closest relationships be outside their direct, spiritual community.
One place was a job,
everywhere else was where they were truly known.
I understand the inclination of that.
Never more so than over the last eighteen months and a complex church revitalization situation. It’s also true that, because of our many moves for either education or jobs, we do have people in many places. People who know and support, through both consolation and confrontation, the real Tom & Charissa.
And yet, the moment I heard those words, I also knew I’d become a caricature of myself if I did things that way. Splicing out who got to see what side of me for the sake of self-preservation just isn’t how my brain is wired.
For better or for worse, I’m whole-heartedly in the place my feet are planted. There are certainly levels of rawness. Not everyone gets the whole story but they at least have a copy of the book, so to speak.
Living this way means the inevitable rejection hurts more, but the riches? They abound in far greater measure.
I’m not sure what reason that long-ago in my life person had for drawing those boundaries. There are certainly good and necessary boxes to put around relationships determined to misrepresent you, your motives or your beliefs. There are times to cut ties. There are also a wide variety of personality and relational thresholds across our shared humanity.
My impression of their words though was that they lived that way as a general rule not as a healthy response to specific situations and that was what I knew I could never sustain.
If ministry is the abundance of a personal, spiritual life and, at its healthiest, I truly believe that’s meant to be the case, then vulnerability and presence are part and parcel of the process.
To be in community is to bear witness to each other’s becoming. It’s leadership with open hands not iron fists, it’s truly believing that differences of opinion on secondary and tertiary matters don’t have to bring division, it’s investing regardless of returns and believing that the ethics of an inverse kingdom should inform more than just social media posts.
Today’s little poem tumbled out of an overflow of gratitude for a variety of different relationships in my life. For the saints who embody the Savior. For people who have been salt to me. Curing, preserving, stinging, flavoring.
By God, we will keep each other,
By God, we will walk each other home in ways of life.
