My Grandpa White used to tell an old story about a pastor driving to town and in his Model T car. Or as they used to call old cars like that, a "jalopy".
He passed a family pushing their jalopy to town. Like the gentleman the pastor was, he stopped and asked if the family needed help pushing their jalopy. They refused and said that the jalopy runs but it breaks down so often that they decided to push it- because sooner or later it was going to break down. Remember, when my Grandpa was young cars were just finding their way into our society and people had to change their thinking to get used to the automobile. So the pastor said, “Well I have a rope in the car so I could pull you to town!” They all laughed and said, “What would be the use? The car runs- if we wanted to, we could drive to town!”
His point was that many times we like our problems better than the solution so nothing is going to change until we change our ways.
We need to rebuild our lives, families, church, nation and world and we can start right now.
The Bible teaches that human beings were designed to be in community with other human beings. God put it this way, “It is not good that man should be alone.” Genesis 2:18
Yet the world has been pulling away from community for the past few years. Marriages and families are pulling apart because without Christ at the center of our lives, we do not have that center of love from which we draw the resources to make our relationships really work.
Last week, a sixteen-year-old boy who is black was trying to pick up his siblings to take them home. The boy accidentally went to the wrong address and the homeowner shot him twice because of the homeowner’s own racial bias toward the boy.
A 20-year-old girl was driving up a driveway in a car with her friends. It was the wrong driveway so they turned around and the owner of the home came out and shot her in the car.
In Texas this week, two cheerleaders accidentally opened a car door and when one of them started to apologize the owner of the car shot them.
There was another mass shooting this week in Alabama and it’s Wednesday as I’m writing this so we don’t know how many more crazy things are going to happen this week because we have four more days left.
Evangelical Thinker, David Brooks, who writes for the New York Times and has hosted programs on PBS- discussed an article in the New York Times about how Evangelicals can save themselves from themselves. He points out that the times we are in represent a mental health emergency. The number of people who don’t have close friends has quad tripled in this generation. Fifty four percent of Americans say that no one knows me well. Car accidents are increasing even though we are driving fewer miles. Depression is dramatically up, teen suicide is sky rocketing, political division is up, the potential for world war is increasing dramatically, divorce is increasing, kids leaving home to live on the streets is up, and the symptoms of breakdown of community in the world are so rampant that it is hard to statistically report them all.
He is arguing that we need to not just try and patch our communities back to the way it was prior to 2013 but to build our churches, families, nations and world community better than it ever was. It is a moral problem, and we need to turn to Jesus.
I have good news for you. God has the power to heal the world, our nation, our church and your family. He does and it is our choice to admit when we are wrong and change our plans to line up with his ways and experience it.
Join us this Sunday morning at 10:30 as we work together on building community with Spirit. Let’s stop pushing the old Jalopy and get in and drive. Come to church as a family - Gods way is better than whatever plan we are trying to make work.
Your friend for the rest of my life,
Pastor Tim White
