A balanced church – seven

i love st. augustine grass.  thick blades.  dark green.  healthy.  strong.  tall.  for those of you that were with me a few years ago, you got to hear my weekly update on my quest to resurrect the lawn in my front yard.  due to pure stupidity, i killed my beautiful st. augustine carpet.  apparently, socal landscaping practice doesn’t work so well in the great state.  go figure…

after three years of patient shepherding of my little st. augustine flock, it was back to health.  fat (phat?). lush.  growing.  the pride of temple drive.  then came spring.  then summer.  now…a fungus.

it’s taken my lawn hostage.  brown patches.  frog eyes (what the landscaping experts call them…they’re really ugly).  dead grass.  irregular growth.  the beauty of my front yard is now reduced to wasteland.  a toxic catastrophe of epic proportion.  sadness.  frustration.  depression.  all that hard work for nothing…

i really hope you share my pain.  or else be bold enough to laugh in my face and tell me to get my priorities straight.

here’s the lesson, tho…  i’ve been talking this past week, or so, about what makes a healthy, balanced church.  one major component is fellowship.  good, strong, healthy, bold, honest, loyal, committed relationships.  people who stick with you no matter what.  you can count on them.  they’ve got your back and won’t vanish when things get tough.  friendship full of laughter, tears, conflict, resolution, fun, understanding and forgiveness.  

but nothing will kill fellowship quicker than fungus…er, sin.  you work diligently, yet sometimes it creeps in.  the sin might be small.  completely unnoticed to everyone…but you.  so you ignore it.  but sin corrupts. it works its way into relationships and begins to slowly infect.  you disregard it  but it does its work.  you overlook it.  but it passes on its infection to everything it touches.  it will kill.  

the answer?  for st. augustine, its heavy doses of powerful fungicide, patient work to purge the lawn of dead grass and the remnants of the infection, protecting the healthy grass from any remaining fungus, and the slow process of letting the grass grow back to health.

i’m not sure its much different for the church.

#fellowship #sin #staugustinegrass