Our Real Task
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Marcia Hollis wrote in Down to Earth these words: "Except for the call to love God and our neighbor, there is no universal vocation, and unlike the plants in the vegetable garden, we are not all neatly lined up in a row with a paper at the end to say what we are."
As I look back at my own past I think that the real conquest of the party spirit occurred when the realization dawned upon my consciousness that we do not all have to be carbon copies of one another in order to please God and be welcomed into the divine family. We had often remarked that our own children were unique and dissimilar, and we thought nothing of it. In fact, we rejoiced that they were different and we could tell them apart. I cannot figure out how or why I came to believe that all who were born again had to be "the spitting image" of one another, as the old-timers used to express it.
We have not been cut out with a holy cookie-cutter to be like so many gingerbread men exhibited in a divine showcase. Instead, we are vital and living beings, translated into a new relationship by being born again. Our natural abilities and aptitudes are not destroyed in the process. They are sanctified and enhanced by the Holy Spirit until we have been recreated and made into vessels fit for the Master's use. It is no credit to the various factions, mistakenly self-identified as the body of Christ, that they have engaged in a constant effort to pound and pummel God's children into their own moulds in order to manipulate and control them for gain or glory! They have engaged in rearing parrots and mockingbirds rather than children!
It seems difficult for most of us to do more than pay casual lipservice to the idea and the ideal of the ministry of all the saints. We are hooked on the idea of a professional clergy and cannot seriously and sincerely grasp the thought that God employs butchers and bakers and candlestick makers as his witnesses in this neo-pagan world. For a long time we kept up the pretence that we had to have a polished front man to attract the populace with smooth-flowing oratory, but now a lot of folk are "flaking off" from the "organized church" to meet in homes where they can talk to one another on an everyday plane and not be subjected to canned sermons served up from outlines in Ministers Monthly.
Of course the big problem is that we ceased to be the family of God and made the church "big business." That caused us to quit being brothers and sisters and we became "members" and stockholders. A well-oiled machine needs only cogs in the wheels to keep purring, and while a cog is as de-personalized and cold as a robot, it will keep functioning as long as you can make it believe that Jesus died for the machinery and paid his blood for the enterprise.
I think there are signs everywhere that men and women are recapturing the glorious thought that we are on earth, not simply to buy huge acreages, or pile up brick, stone and mortgages, but to share in the agony of mankind, and "helping to complete, in our poor human flesh, the
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