Learnings

Small group is not just a group of people getting together to read scripture, pray or have awkward conversation, but a small group is the ability to enjoy the creation that God orchestrated in human time. The created beings that were first created by God and then inducted into the death of sin.

For a long time I so desperately wanted to be apart of a small group where every personality matched and flowed spiritually together. The reality is that God created human personality and breathes life into people differently. I will probably never be in a small group where our souls match simply because it would become a comfortable place where discipleship would be stagnant and Christ would become a lost icon. An icon that becomes the cross which hangs lonely and desolate in a musty sanctuary.

The question than becomes what we are going to do with the reality of sinful separateness. When we become intimate with God, when we come near to God He comes near to us. When we enter into the love of God and become hidden in Christ by the guidance of the Holy Spirit we learn to love the person that God created. We learn how to love the person that God willed us to individually be. A person that was created, before sin stabbed us with a poisonous knife. Before this poison that runs through out veins and seeps into our heart was introduced into our life.

When we become complete in the true life we learn how to live life. When we learn how to live life we become lovers of those who are around us. This creates not only the ability, but the command to love the people who might not know what this life is all about. This life also commands us to love the people who might have experienced the life but who might not know how to live this life truly out.

When we realize that God enjoys who we are, where we are, then we can truly enjoy the people who are in our small groups, in our families, in our schools, in our lives. We can enjoy them where they are and how God has created them to be.

If we refuse to do this, to accept the love that God has given us, to accept that God not only loves us but likes us, enjoys us. If we cannot realize this then we do not understand the sacrifice of the life that we enjoy now that was brought upon the cross. We ultimately say no to Jesus, his life, his death, and his Resurrection.

And that is when the cross becomes the lonely icon that hangs in the sanctuary that traps the moderate and mundane 'Christian' reality.