Lessons from a Marine and James

If you missed church last Sunday, you missed a great lesson learned by a friend of mine as a new Marine Recruit. The Six-Foot Circle Rule as he called it went like this:  You are responsible not only for yourself, but for anyone within six feet of you.  I think this summarizes well what James was conveying in his last two verses.  We too are called to care about what happens in our own six-foot circle because there is truth, death to avoided and a duty to respond armed with love to keep others from it.

 

But what happens when you humbly, prayerfully and intentionally do your best to bring a wanderer back and they reject or slander you as a result? There is that risk given the level of self-deceit we are all prone to.  What then?  Release them back to God the same way you approached them … humbly, prayerfully, and intentionally.  

For as we say in Stephen Ministry God is the Curegiver and we the Caregiver!  Or as Covenant Pastor, Judy Peterson says, we’re just tubes, tubes for His transforming love! Therefore whatever the immediate response may seem to be, we can leave the final outcome safely in God’s hands and timing.

And trust me, that’s a good thing!  Just learning how to be a good tube … free from our own clogs or sludge so the Spirit might move through … is challenging enough! May God bless our efforts to become this well, so we might also Become One together.

-Pastor Dawn-