When families travel long distances together they learn a great deal about each other.  Some of the most significant things I learned about my family I learned crammed between my two sisters in the backseat of our 1957 two-door Ford Fairlane traveling up and down Highway 36 on long, hot summer days, to and from vacations with grandparents.  One way or another, for better or worse, you learn a great deal about each other when you go that far that close together.  Some of our church family recently traveled to Colorado to ski.  One bus, seventeen hours up, seventeen back.  We learned a great deal about each other, traveling that far that close together.

In retrospect, that trip proved to be something of a living parable about our church, about the challenges and opportunities we’ll face and how we’ll handle them as we travel this road together into this new year.  We’ve come a long way this past year; we’ve made some good and hard decisions.  We’ve defined our core values and declared a mission statement to guide us.  We’ve begun to actually flesh out how our resources, personal, programmatic, budgetary and otherwise will be directed toward Sharing Christ Through Caring Relationships.  We’ve come a long way; we have far to go.  Whatever else happens, we’ll learn a great deal about each other as we travel this road.  How we’ll apply what we learn to how we live will have a great deal to do with how we answer three fundamental questions. 

I found these questions posed to me in a letter written twenty centuries ago to another church as it turned its face into the wind of challenge.  It was written to the church at Corinth by the apostle Paul.  Paul had started the church at Corinth and then, answering his missionary calling, had moved on down the road.  Yet, he’d kept in touch with these folks as he tried to shepherd them through the uncharted waters of their new life together in Christ.  These people lived in a difficult culture, not all that different from what some people have defined as the postmodern American culture.  There was virtually nothing in their known world that reflected the Christian worldview.  People coming into the church had all different kinds of needs and expectations and values.  This was frontier Christianity, in the truest sense, Discipleship 101. 

To complicate matters, there were some in the church who, for various reasons, had tried to discredit Paul, question his integrity and his motives and undermine his work.  They’d caused the church and Paul a great deal of pain.  Paul genuinely loved these people and wanted to journey with them on down the road toward their calling in Christ.  So, he wrote them two letters.  When you read the Corinthian letters you will discover Paul to be about as passionate and confessional as you will ever find him.  This is a man as much in touch with his own frail humanity as he is the unblemished divinty of the risen Christ.  He’s also candidly, painfully frank.  In order to defend himself and maintain his relationship with these people, he lays all his cards on the table about who he is, what he believes and about the passion of his soul that drives him to risk his very life for the gospel.

In the process, he gave every church that would ever exist a model, something of a relational roadmap, for how to travel long distances together.  For the sake of simplicity, I have reduced his model to three questions.  Questions we must now ask ourselves.  We live in a culture that is increasingly non-Christian.  There is very little in our world that will naturally sustain a genuinely Christian way of life.  To choose to be sincerely Christian in this culture, to live out what we have declared to be our values, we will have to swim upstream, against the current in nearly every facet of life.  How we invest ourselves, our time, our money and, most of all, how we relate to each other must be measured against Jesus’ words, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).”  Paul’s words, in the form of these questions, give us a very good guide to what that love will look like in action in the local church, as we travel this road.

Will we keep our hearts open to each other?  “Make room in your hearts for us . . . for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together.”  Earlier in this same letter he’d pleaded much the same thing with these words.  “We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you.  There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours.  In return – open wide your hearts also (6:11-13).” 

It would appear that, from the very birth of the church, one of the greatest challenges to Christians has not been a culture outside the church that is hostile to their faith but the challenge of living their faith in relationship to each other within the church, of keeping their hearts open to fellow believers, the very people with whom we’re called to take the longest journey of our lives.  To allow our way of seeing each other to be transformed by the presence of the living Christ among us.  To grow in seeing others through God’s eyes not just our own.  To see each other not in terms of our past sins and failures, even toward each other, but in terms of what God is doing in us individually and among us corporately.  Yet again, earlier in this same letter and on the basis of God’s mercy and transforming grace in Christ, Paul had written, “From now on . . . we regard no one from a human point of view . . . if anyone is in Christ (they are) a new creation (5:16-17).”  To be Christian means to choose to see people differently, the way God sees them.  Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of true Christian maturity. 

When I was a youth minister one summer years ago in a church in Odessa, there was a young lady there, a college student like me, who had come home for the summer.  I never actually met Judy, just saw her at a distance.  For some reason I didn’t like her; she seemed arrogant and standoffish.  In that sinfully simple way we all sometimes do, I wrote her off as not worth my time.  Just a few years later, while in seminary, I looked up one day and there sat Judy.  We finally met.  I came to discover that she was nothing like what I had judged her to be.  She was jovial, warm, caring and very much in love with her Lord.  Like me, she had experienced God’s call on her life to vocational ministry and was in seminary training for that service.  We became close friends, dear friends.  A few years later, she and her fiancé asked me to perform their wedding ceremony.  And, I’ve never forgotten the lesson, though I still need a refresher now and then.

When we judge people at a distance we always misjudge them because we pre-judge them without the facts.  Pre-judging is what it is, prejudice.  There is nothing about being Christian that allows room in our hearts for prejudice, especially toward a fellow sister or brother in Christ.  Often, our greatest problem with prejudice is not with people of different color or social standing but with people who are just like us, people we’ve come to know all too well.  To be Christian means to keep our hearts open, even to people we don’t like or don’t understand.  In truth, there is much about each of us we will never know or understand.  After my last pastor’s column on the Serenity Prayer, Norma Greathouse sent me another version of the prayer, the Senility Prayer.  “God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones that I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.” 

Well, maybe I should say it again, just as a refresher.  One of the greatest evidences that Christ is truly at work in our hearts is that the way we see each other is constantly being revised according to a more God-like point of view.  We all carry emotional, psychological and spiritual baggage.  None of us really knows or can see what is going on in the deepest recesses of each other’s soul.  The command of Christ to us is not to know or understand what we can’t see, know or understand.  Our calling is to see each other as what we are, sisters and brothers in Christ, and to keep our hearts open, to love one another.  Will we?

Will we say the good word?  Some of these people had been party to wounding Paul deeply.  He loved them anyway.  Even though he could have legitimately berated them for their petty, even cold-hearted way of treating him, he chose instead to say something encouraging, something good.  “I often boast about you; I have great pride in you.”  There is something about looking for and

saying the best thing you can about another that makes a long journey more bearable, more meaningful.  There is also something very Christian about it.

Jesus was God’s spoken Word, in the flesh, to us (John 1).  Of all the things God could have said in response to our sin, he chose to say the good thing, the best thing.  He could have spoken judgment and condemnation.  Instead, God said, “Jesus.”  Like “Jesus,” good words have the power to give life.  Words of meanness and petty judgment only drain life away.  This year, as we travel this road, what words will we find to say to each other? 

My best memories of Barbara Rister are 16mm black and white family movie memories.  Barbara and her husband Ivis were my parent’s best friends when I was growing up.  I have no memory of not seeing her smile or hearing her laugh or saying the kind, encouraging thing.  She was just one of those people who warmed every place she stood and every heart she touched.  Dad called Thursday morning to tell me that Barbara had died; cancer finally won the yearlong battle.  But, even death can’t rob the energy I still feel from the times she smiled, and loved and said the good word.  There just aren’t enough Barbaras in this world.  There’s always room for one more person who will look for the good thing to say.  Will we be that one to someone, anyone else, as we travel this road?

Will we be open to God coming alongside us through others?  Paul’s colleague, Titus, had visited the Corinthian church in Paul’s absence and had brought a good report back to Paul of the people’s concern for him.  It had warmed Paul’s heart like a glowing fireplace on a cold winter night.  Paul went so far as to say that, through Titus, God had come to his aid.  “God, who consoles the downcast, consoled us by the arrival of Titus . . ..” 

These words, “consoles” and “consoled,” also translated “comforts” and “comforted (NIV),” have an interesting root.  They come from the same word Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit, paraclete, one who comes to walk alongside.  Just as God comes to walk alongside us, to journey with us as we travel this road, in the person of the Holy Spirit, so Paul was saying God also does through other people.  Through Titus, God had “consoled” Paul in his distress, come to walk alongside him.  God most often comes to us, comforts, consoles and encourages us through other people.  Will we be open to how he may do that, even through people we might have never expected to be the presence of Christ to us?  Will we be the presence of Christ to others?

The bus we rode on to Colorado was brand new, only four days old.  It was clean and it even smelled good.  When you’re traveling a long way with the same group of people, smell matters, and, smells matter.  The bus also had video screens so that we were able to watch movies going down the road.  On the way home, some of us were looking forward to the 1971 Fiddler on the Roof.  But, one young man, eleven-year-old Alex, a guest with us on the trip, produced a copy of 2001’s Monsters, Inc., a wonderful animated film about monsters whose job it is to scare little children and convert their screams into energy for industry. 

I was really looking forward to watching Tevye, the Jewish milkman, jiggle his belly and celebrate his tradition!!  Besides, Fiddler would add just a touch of culture, I figured.  But, when I looked into Alex’s eyes, I just couldn’t say no.  And, being a good Baptist, I put it to a vote. Tradition!!  lost, and we soon found ourselves watching some big blue furry monster named Sully and his one-eyed companion, Mike, waltz their way across the screen and into our hearts.  You see, I was surprised, Judy-like, to find that what I thought I would not enjoy not only made me laugh hilariously but also conveyed the reminder of a great moral truth. 

Sully and Mike, vying for scarer of the year, had their plans thwarted by a little child they named “Boo.”  In their world, Sully and Mike had been trained to actually fear the children they were trying to scare. 

But, Boo wiggled her way into their hearts and taught them that laughter always has more power than screams.  Sully’s and Mike’s world was transformed by someone they at first thought could destroy it.  A very good gift came to them from someone that had previously frightened them. 

Alex gifted me by asking me to see the world from his eleven-year-old perspective, for just a little while.  I laughed more and enjoyed the trip more than I would have had Alex not come alongside to give me his gift and the journey for both us was more meaningful.  I can always watch Fiddler again.  I might have otherwise never seen Monsters, Inc.  Alex’s gift reminded me that there are people all around us who have the gift of God for us and are willing to share it, even people we might not have otherwise accepted into our lives.  Are we willing to receive what they have to give?

We’ve come a long, good way.  We have far to go.  As we travel this road, getting from where we are to a place we’ve never been and whether we get there having reminded those who watch us along the way Whose we are, will have a great deal to do with whether we keep our hearts open to each other, whether we’ll say the good word and whether we’ll be open to how God comes to us through each other.

Will we?  Will keep our hearts open?  Will we say the good word?  Will we let God come to us through each other? 

Will we?