I was fifteen the summer that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the gulf coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana. I remember watching TV with the rest of a horrified nation as the news about it got worse and worse. The levvies failed, entire homes were washed away, the loss of human life was staggering. The next time my youth group met, it was all we could talk about - how could we help? We considered raising money or collecting things like clothes and diapers. Everything there was such a mess, and it just didn’t seem like there was much we could do about it.
A few months later, we were all at a youth group meeting, and our youth pastor - a wonderful man named Harald who went home to be with Jesus a few years ago - asked us how we felt about taking a trip to Mississippi in the summer of 2006 to help with the rebuilding process. This wouldn’t be the summer camp or short term missions that we had grown accustomed to - the work would be much harder; we’d probably have to sleep in disaster relief trailers or tents; it was further from home than most of us had been before. We all agreed and Harald and several other youth pastors from the area spent months coordinating a group of about 150 of us to go for a week in July.
The group that I was assigned to was supposed to replace a storm-damaged and rotten roof in a house that belonged to a really sweet older lady who brought us cookies and lemonade the day that we showed up to start work. I can’t recall a week in my life that I’ve worked harder than that week in Biloxi, Mississippi in July of 2006. I had done some mission projects that required light construction before, but the leader of that group taught me how to operate a circular saw, the right way to spread tar on roofing paper, and the correct number of nails for each shingle so that the finished project would pass a building inspection.
I probably don’t need to tell you that, as a sixteen-year-old, I didn’t walk into this experience with the carpentry knowledge to do this work. I had to be taught and corrected every step of the way. By the end of the week I was doing alright, but the man who ran that work site was incredibly patient with all of us. There’s no doubt in my mind that an experienced roofing team could have finished that job faster, but I’ll remember standing beside that house when the disaster coordinator declared that our roof had passed inspection for the rest of my life.
I had been given an opportunity, as a very young person, to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I think the word I want to use for my second core value is mutuality. It’s a word I first learned in high-school biology as we were taught to think about the natural cycles in the earth’s environment. Every part of God’s good creation has a job and all the jobs depend on each other.
That’s how I feel about church, and the work of the church, and the week that I spent roofing a house in Mississippi: We desperately need each other to survive.
There’s a lot that we’re called to do as God’s people. We’re called to share the Good News, to feed the hungry, to welcome the outcast, and to be a part of righting the things that have gone wrong in our world. That’s a tall order, and it’s a calling that runs in direct opposition to the stories our culture tells us about success.
Our culture says that we should be entirely self-sufficient - that everything in our life should be about doing whatever it takes to take care of ourselves as efficiently as possible. It tells us that money, power, consumerism, and individualism are the best ways to make a life.
I think God’s way is different and better for us. From the laws for communal living in the Old Testament, to the prophets’ cries for justice, to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, to Paul talking about the necessity of the body of Christ, I think God’s design for God’s people is a life of interconnectivity. We were made for community and made to depend on each other.
I think we see beautiful examples of this in our local church. It takes an entire body of believers to keep things running. Some people are called to preaching and teaching. Some are called to hospital visitation or serving on the finance committee. Some are called to preparing and serving food. We all have different skills and talents and God says that each one of them is vital to Kingdom work. Every piece of the puzzle is crucial.
In this process - in the working out and practicing of these gifts - we learn how to take care of each other. We do things like offer to give kids a ride home from church and show them that there are adults who care about them. We schedule a meal train to make sure that parents who have brought their new baby home from the hospital have a freezer full of casseroles. We rake leaves and mow grass for folks whose mobility isn’t what it once was. We see a need in our community and decide that we can meet it with our combined skills and knowledge. We serve and love each other and the world through our words and our actions. We pass on this knowledge and this kind of life to the next generation as we show them how very good it is to take care of each other.
I don’t think I can guarantee that this kind of Kingdom life is always efficient or that we don’t make mistakes as we learn to do it. It would be faster and simpler for several high-capacity people to run everything and make every decision. But that’s not what Jesus calls us to. Jesus calls us to figure it out alongside others who are figuring it out too.
It’s a little bit bonkers to do something like hand a sixteen-year-old a nail gun and a box of roofing nails. She’s never done this kind of work. She’s a little bit afraid of the ladder. She’s going to need you to show her something more than once before she gets it right.
But maybe it’s worth it anyway.
Maybe she’ll learn that she’s more capable than she knew. Maybe she’ll get to hug the lady whose roof she helped fix and realize that she can serve God and serve others even if she’s not a professional. Maybe she’ll realize that her hands, her work, her voice matters to her church and to the whole body of believers in the world.
She might just realize that a life lived in community, taking care of others and letting others take care of her too, is a better option than chasing money, or a big house, or thousands of Instagram followers.
Mutuality. Connection. Serving and being served. Life in a big, messy, holy community.
A life oriented towards worshipping God and being with other people made in God’s image. It’s what God made us for.