manure

Manure and Ships

Someone once said that Christians are like manure. When they are all piled up together they stink, but when you spread them out, they are like fertilizer. Too much we love to argue the little details that aren't very important (I have been a self-certified expert on arguing some of the stupidest things for too many years.) when we get together, yet once we are left on our own, and we actually trust God to help us, we see great things done through us. Does this hit home?

I think Christ hits upon this when He talks about us being the salt of the earth. Imagine a butcher, trying to preserve or flavor some meat by spreading the salt over it. If you put all the salt in one corner of the steak, it doesn't get the job done. In order to flavor or preserve the steak, the salt needs to be spread out over the whole steak, relatively evenly and thickly. If Jesus saw Christians as the "salt of the world", He may not want us to gather in one corner.

So what do so many of us do? We gather in our corner every Sunday, away from the meat that has no salt. We even read our own magazines, try to spend the week with each other. We are magnetic salt! We attract each other, stay with each other, and then ... have the audacity to complain that the rest of the steak we are on is rotting!

Another way to put this is, "Ships are very safe in harbor, but they were not built to stay there."

Yet another, "Use what you can't change as an excuse, and you won't change (grow) at all."

We are to be "in the world" and not "of the world". God wants us all over that steak!