Popularity Verses Platform

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I remember how excited I was when I first joined Facebook. After I made my profile I went searching for all my friends, eager to add them. It only took a minute or two to find them all. There were only a few. I remember feeling a little let down. All my friends have hundreds of friends of their own. I only have a few. Today I have 130 friends, which may sound like a lot, but by Facebook standards, is not that many. One of my friends has 228 friends on Facebook – and she only joined a few months ago.

At first it mattered a lot to me. I felt a little left out, to be honest. I wanted to be “as good as” everyone else – as if such things can be measure in friends lists, likes, or comments. The other day I was thinking about this blog, with its 33 real followers (the counter says 163, but the rest are my Facebook friends who automatically see this content whether they want to read it or not) and limited scope. For a moment I felt a little lost in the minutia of such a small blog in such a big blogosphere. I thought, do I want to be popular? Immediately, I knew that’s not what I wanted. I am an introvert, after all. But platform, that’s a word I could relate to.

We all want a space where people will hear what we have to say, but what do we want to do with it? Is it for fame or popularity? Or is it for a platform to shout something important?- Something outside of ourselves?

A platform is a place, with an audience, where I have the freedom to say unpopular things. Things like #BlackLivesMatter or Jesus is the Son of God. If I was worried about popularity, I couldn’t say those things. If I wanted more followers, I would have to cater to my audience and worry about what they want to hear. But a platform is a place to speak about the things I think God has laid on my heart. Sometimes everyone will like what I have to say and follow this blog. Sometimes they will not.

But beyond the blog, or the social media accounts, I think we all have platforms. Our lives are a platform. We are all walking, talking billboards for something. If we’re focused on popularity, though, we miss the chance to share deeply with those around us. When we’re worried about numbers we forget about people. As a platform, instead, we choose what we present as a way to reach out to those around us. And I think that’s the best PR strategy we can find.

Take a Number and Have a Seat

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I was thinking about something today, as I was digging down into the dirt, since it is always when I am working, focused on a task, that a new thought tends to poke its way into my consciousness. My thought was about numbers.

Numbers define us, almost without our knowing it. It starts when we are born. For instance, the day I was born I received two sets of numbers that would be a part of my identity for the rest of my life. I got a birthday and a social security number. My social security number is unique to me and marks my place as an American citizen. My birthday gives me another number — my age. Two other numbers were affixed to me at birth, although they did not stay the same over time. The nurses laid me down, weighed me, and measured me. And while those very first measurements mean little to me now, my height and weight are an important part of my existence today.

Now I have even more numbers attached to me, that mark out my life. There’s a number that denotes which house I live in. When I call my friend on the phone, although she sees my name and face, it’s my phone number that her phone recognizes. My bank knows me by my account number. My college lets me into the dining hall by the number on my student ID.

So what’s my point? Besides the thought exercise it afforded me while I was kneeling in the soil, why does it matter? It matters because God knows a number associated with me, and only me, too.

God knows the number of the hairs on my head.

Everyone else in the whole wide world can know the numbers that I can rattle off about myself. But only God knows the number of hairs that are on my head. Only He knows such an intimate, close detail of me — one that even I don’t know. And it’s the only number that doesn’t define me. It’s a number that defines God, and how greatly He cares for me. Because when people say that “I’m only a number on my college campus” they mean that their professors don’t know who they are. But when the Creator of the universe comes close enough to count the individual strands of hair that are on your head, you become more than just a number on a chart or one of countless faces in the audience. You become known by God.

And that’s infinitely special. It grabs deeply at my heart, when the numbers I carry around on my earthly frame fall away in the knowledge of my eternal identity. I have a soul that is not confined to the things easily seen or said about me. I have a soul that is laid bare before my Maker, who sees it and still chooses to come close and know every intricate detail of my existence. It’s a beautiful thing, and as I become aware of the magnitude of it, I am eternally thankful.

Wed in White

I walked past the tv that’s incessantly on in the residence hall lobby. A woman’s voice caught my attention as I walked out the door. She was introducing herself saying, “I design the single most important garment that a woman will ever wear — her wedding dress.”

I think I may have visibly rolled my eyes. My first instinctive reaction is are you kidding me? How is it that over the span of a woman’s life, that one particular white dress will matter more than anything else? Why do we put so much expectation on one day of our lives?

Don’t get me wrong. Weddings are important, distinctive moments that can definitely be a highlight in a woman’s life. But it astounds me that there is such a massive industry that sells this idea of a perfect, life altering ceremony, and that it must include a long, sweeping white gown, a towering wedding cake, and $25,000 to spend on all of it.

Forgive me for not feeling swept up into the ideology. I tend to think the life after the wedding is so much more important than the one afternoon that signifies the change.

It was while I was mulling these things over in my head, that a thought occurred to me. Maybe she was right. Maybe the wedding dress is the most important dress we’ll ever wear. I don’t mean it’s the most important thing I’ll wear, but we’ll wear.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” Ephesians 5:25-27

The Church has been likened in the Bible to the Bride of Christ. Someday there is going to be a great wedding and the Church is going to be clothed in the “righteous deeds of the saints.”

“’Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
 it was granted her to clothe herself
    with fine linen, bright and pure’—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.” Revelation 19:6b-8

Right now we are stuck with a shadow of the things to come. We marry in white (really, that is Queen Victoria’s fault) and pledge our faithfulness to one another, but we are broken fragments of righteousness. Our unfaithfulness to each other is easily seen, but our unfaithfulness to Christ is so much more prevalent. Yet, even in our soiled condition, Christ is going to bind up our wounds and make us wholly holy with Him as His Bride.

That wedding day will be the most important day ever. The righteous deeds of the saints will be a shining white garment for the Bride of Christ. So while that woman on tv probably doesn’t design those types of dresses, she may be closer to the truth than she knows.

We Cannot be Islands

It is amazing to me what a profound impact other people can have on the landscape of my own soul. We are communal creations — not made to live alone in this vacuum of self-righteousness that we think we have. It’s funny how, in American culture, we only respect individuality and this strange isolation of our beings from others around us. This is how we starve and die. The intensity of human experiences cannot be found in solo existences. We are meant to be touched by the lives of others, just as real and as painful and beautiful as our own.

A chapel speaker I heard today said that people with physical or mental disabilities often seek healing from God for their bodies. But, sometimes the healing doesn’t come by fixing the broken vessels that their souls live in. More often than that, God intended for healing to be partaken in in the body of Christ. She said that Christian community and acceptance was sometimes all the healing that is intended. We all are people with cracked and damaged vessels, but when we connect with those around us we find healing in being broken and accepted together.

I was not meant to be a penny, which is an isolated, identical copy of every other penny. I was meant to be one minute cell in a great, living organism that’s mission is to envelop the whole world with God’s mighty grace and love. As lives reach out and touch me, and I react to them and connect with other lives, I see my own self being molded and changed. Even the painful encounters — the ones that were not meant to heal or support — have a purpose within my existence. And I’d like to be part of a community that echos that truth.

What Church Needs to Mean to Me

I remember the first time I walked into the church I grew up in. Until that point, my family had gone to small church out in the countryside. For various reasons that, as a nine year old, I didn’t totally understand, my parents decided to try going to a new church. The moment I walked inside the doors I remember my first thought being, “This doesn’t look like a church.” It was a large, modern building, with its own separate wing for elementary-aged kids like me and a sanctuary that could seat 2,400 people. It had lights and drums and fun songs.

The older I got, the more I grew to love that place. The shock at the beginning quickly faded away for me. The pastor at that church is an amazing man. He knows how to speak into the lives of the people who congregate in that building, boldly declaring the words of the Bible into my life. In high school I found my own little niche inside the massive body of believers. I volunteered on the tech team, running cameras during the service and later interning there during the week. It was “home,” I guess.

But now I am not living in that town anymore, since I’m gone away to college. Here my roommate and I had to find another place to gather and worship at on Sunday mornings. With a sinking feeling, I realized there was not a single church in the area like my church back home. The small, country congregations complete with hymns and pews did not feel like “church” to me. Suddenly I was nine again, wondering what kind of place these churches were.

What is church? That’s the question that’s been staring me in the face since I’ve been here. The lowercase “c” church that I attend on Sundays is less than five miles from my dorm room. It’s a Baptist church with about 40 members. The pastor is friendly and his words tap at my heart. When I go to church back home now, I’m struck by the beautiful music and synchronized lights. But they aren’t Church.

What makes a building a church anyway? As a kid, I thought it was the steeple with a cross on the outside of the structure, but the new church we went to didn’t have those things. Later I thought it was a place where Christians gathered to “worship” and listen to a skilled preacher proclaim the truth of the Bible. Now I’m not so sure. The Church, it seems to me, has less to do with the place and more to do with the people. We could gather in a tavern, for all God would care, if we were gathering as Christ’s hands and feet.

I guess I’m frustrated at my own reluctance to readily accept these believers in other congregations as my family. It’s not that I think they aren’t Christians — far from it. It’s just that they don’t sing like I do or pray like I do or lift up their hands. They don’t do “church” how I do church. Why on earth do those four walls and a stage mean so much to me? If God can indwell a burning bush, can He not indwell me? And since He can — and I know He does — why do I allow this Americanized version of the church change the real meaning of who the Church truly is?

The Church is me. The Church is my roommate, the pastor at home and the pastor here, the woman who plays the trumpet for “special music,” and the little boy who stands in an angel costume and proclaims “good news of great joy that shall be for all the people.” Church is not a building, it is Christ with us, in us, for us. If I really let that truth saturate my heart and change how my mind thinks, then it doesn’t matter what building I stand in on Sunday mornings. The Church is the same wherever the faithful have gathered in the name of God.