by Pastor Tim White

Life is good.  Think about it - there is so much to celebrate, and we need to be thankful.  This week is going to be the conclusion of our series on peacemaking.  And we are looking at peacemaking in the “Corinthian Correspondence”. For years I taught a course on Corinthians Correspondence at Northwest University.  I believe it was a required course because my students were nursing students, teaching students, counseling students, and pastoral ministry students.  I loved the subject matter, but I also loved the students that I had over the years.  They were inspiring. I have stayed in touch with a lot of them and enjoy reading about their continued success.  One of the ideas that we focused on was discovering your gift mix and knowing how to get involved with a team using it.

In the middle of all the joys of life we humans have this major challenge.  We want our lives to count.  Every human being has this need.  Even when we are stuck at home during a pandemic, we need to know that our lives matter.  How do we fit into the big picture?  Well, l Corinthians lets us know that we need teamwork to make the peace work. We can all accomplish so much more as a team than what we could as an individual.  And that presents us with a problem.  All of our weaknesses that cause us not to engage with other imperfect people hold us back to the thrill of the adventure of life.  Do you want to grow in your enjoyment of the goodness of life? Then you need to enjoy the teamwork of life, so you can use your giftedness.  

Remember in the movie “Castaway”when the Tom Hanks character was stranded on a beautiful desert island in the South Pacific?  The landscape was beautiful to watch on the movie screen, but it wasn’t enough, so he fell in love with a volleyball with a face painted on it called Wilson.  We laugh at it, but it really was sad when he lost Wilson at sea.  He had a basic human need to have his life to mean something and for that he needed relationships.  Since he had none, he invented it.

Now, don’t think that I am encouraging each of us who are stranded at home to buy a volleyball.  But we still need to have our lives matter.  We need to be a part of a team (the church) in the great challenge of bringing peace to the world through the love of Jesus Christ.  Is that possible in our situation today?  Yes.  Is it going to be easy?  No.  But nevertheless, we can do it, as long as we all apply ourselves to using our gift mixes to form a team which can adapt to circumstance and let God prevail.  

This week let us all work on finding our gift and using it.

Your friend for the rest of my life,

Pastor Tim White