Immersion

New beginnings. Aren’t they wonderful? Emotions run high, we laugh, smile and do everything with extra energy and enthusiasm. We believe we’ve fully merged with whatever it is that we’ve just started and can’t imagine how life could be different. It’s the new car smell, the crisp clean look of new clothes, the photos taken with a new phone and the smile on your face anytime you look at your latest new things. The problem with new is this: new stuff gets old. The question we seldom seriously ask ourselves at the start of a new journey, “Will I still be enthusiastic about this when it becomes old?” The answer at the start is always yes. Time, however, takes us on our journey to truth. It’s the path of self-discovery.

In the fitness world hundreds and thousands of people sign up each year to be part of a gym. A lot of these people join during January, AKA the month of impulsive well-meaning resolutions. We all want to change some aspect of our body. Literally, all of us. Even though we don’t all want to change the same thing. For a lot of impulsive resolution makers, their journey looks something like this:

Week’s 1 and 2: I can do this, it hurts but I can do this; I just need to push through the pain, it will be okay I will achieve my desired outcome.

Week’s 3 and 4: Man I’m busy, I only made it in a few times and I’m starting to feel tired. Keep going, it will be okay, but that treadmill is starting to look like a ravenously hungry monster.

Week’s 5 and 6: It is a ravenously hungry monster.

Week’s 7 and 8: Was I going to workout this week? I just need to give my body a rest.

Week 9 until end: I tried it a few more times, but this just isn’t me. I can’t do it, but I’ll try again when I feel more motivated.

I recognize this isn’t everyone’s fitness story. Sometimes life happens when we make plans. But this is far too common a story, and that’s a problem. Not just for the people who are seeking change, but for those who support them as well. Often times the difference between bowing out early and achieving our goal is someone standing alongside us. They don’t have to be an expert. They can simply be a friend. Or even a stranger willing to listen. No matter the activity, doing it with someone else, even if they just cheer you on from the sidelines, makes a difference. There’s something powerful about togetherness. Something that makes us stronger. It’s the stuff that holds sports teams together; it’s why we care about home field advantage. That’s what many of us need. Someone to make us feel like we are on our home turf. Many of our January joiners would keep going if they simply had the support of one other person. One. Single. Person.

Think about that for a moment.

Encouraging one person can be the difference between success and failure. One encouraging conversation.

I would simply ask, “What kind of conversation would you like to have?”

While we ponder that question, let me answer what it takes to have a ‘successful’ encouraging conversation? Genuine concern. Genuine empathy. You genuinely need to care.

That’s all.

But beware! It means immersing yourself in someone else’s world. It means completely diving in, for better or for worse, and finding out where a light needs to shine.

What is that light?

Hope.

Is there such a thing? Yes. Yes, there is. True hope comes from immersion. We can’t sprinkle tiny hope droplets around. No. We need to full on dump buckets of ice cold hope on people. Maybe not to that extreme, but you get the picture J There’s a big difference between flicking a few water droplets from your fingers at someone and jumping with them into a pool. True hope dives in. True hope gets wet. True hope makes waves. True hope says yes we can and then jumps in regardless of whatever else is happening. True hope changes lives. We need more true hope in our world today.

There’s a question I see running around the internet. “Is there hope for the Church?” I’ve seen it asked in many ways and I’ve seen many criticisms, but most of what I’ve read doesn’t hope. It simply reads like Week 5 of our January exerciser journal. If all the Church is supposed to be is a few fluffy water flakes then yes, there is no hope. But that’s not the Church. The Church is a community founded on true hope. Hope founded on immersion: Ice bucket smothering, grab your buddy and jump in a pool hope. Hope that one small encouraging conversation can make a world of difference.

The truth is the Church is being separated from what it is supposed to be and what it’s not. This is a good thing. This is a natural thing. It’s the story of the Church for the past several thousand years. The Church will not cease in our lifetime, though it will change. What won’t change, what hasn’t changed, is the togetherness. It’s literally the foundation of the Church.

What is that foundation? That God cares. That he cares enough not to leave us in our hopeless condition. That he cares enough to do something about the state of our world. Consider these words of wisdom from Oswald Chambers, writer of My Utmost for His Highest “It is not so true that ‘prayer changes things’ as prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition.” The point of Chamber’s words is this, when we place our hope in God and ask Him to change the world, He enables us to change the world by changing us first.

My hope is that God can change me enough to make a difference. I know God can change anyone who calls out to Him, asking Him to change them. So I’m asking, “God, change me and bring more hope to your world.”