Holding It All Together

 
     Integration.  This word has always interested me.  When something is integrated it has parts that are pulled together into a seamless whole.  We get the word "integrity" from it.  A person of integrity is a person who has their social, emotional, physical, mental, spiritual parts working together in one direction.  In Biblical language we might say that a person of integrity is a person who is experiencing "salvation."  Salvation is when a person's relationships to all things (God, others, and all creation) are rightly connected with justice, grace, mercy, and love.  When that happens a person and all they are related to experiences peace.  In the Christian worldview, we believe that salvation is a gift from God given through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, a gift received and put into action by faith.

     Lately my eyes have become more open to some ways in which our American culture dissects us into many individual parts without a clear concept of how those parts need each other for good living.  Our medical system often approaches healing by trying to isolate the troubled parts of a person's body so that those isolated parts are treated.  Thus we have developed a wide range of specialists who have are proficient at treating parts of a person but sometimes struggle to articulate how the disease and treatments affect the whole person.  Our politics are frequently paralyzed by so many special interest groups who fight for attention and resources, while the whole of society suffers because little thought is given to how one part affects another or how one part depends on another.   Families face greater struggles to stay together because technology draws our attention away from each other to focus on distant relationships and global issues, because our work pulls us away from the home, because our recreation is individualized, and because we travel for just about everything.  Finally, our economy has become dependent on big businesses operated by people who often lose awareness of the effects their business has on local communities and local ecology.  And we wonder why we often don't feel close to our neighbors, we often feel like a number to the businesses we support, we often feel squeezed for time, and we often struggle to hold ourselves and our families together.  Like a thin napkin soaked with water on a table, we feel softened, torn, and pulled apart.  We try to find wholeness, integration, indeed, salvatin in our lives, but we find it increasingly difficult to "hold it all together."

     I point this out not because I wish to be a pessimist but because it has helped me understand some of the larger issues behind the malaise I see in people I work with and in my own life.  If you really want to read some penetrating social criticism I encourage you to read an author by the name of Wendell Berry.  Art of The Commonplace is a book of his essays that really clarified for me the effects of some of the social forces we face in American culture.  I point this out because I am trying, with God's grace, to creatively find ways in which I can tie back together the things that are disconnected to be more integrated again, to find greater wholeness.  Here are some things I'm learning:

 1.  Trust in the grace of Jesus to make me whole.  I can't do it on my own.  I need forgiveness and the strength of the Holy Spirit to be saved.  All creation needs the grace and strength of Jesus to be saved!

2.  Give priority to local relationships, starting with my family, including patronizing locally owned and operated businesses.

3.  Buy locally grown food.

4.  Find ways to network people and businesses together locally.

5.  Be an interested, involved, and helpful neighbor.

6.  Find ways for my local church in Sanford to be the center of building relationships in our community through worship, recreation, education, business, and service.

7.  Learn about the history of the community I'm living in.

     Jesus said in John 10: 10b, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly."  How do you "hold it all together?"  What ideas do you have?

     If you want to learn more, try looking at the latest sermon series or facebook.