Tip of My Iceberg

For the past six days, this has been my world. A hotel room, alone, with a view of life happening around me. I’m not part of it. I’ve been in isolation with Covid, too often feeling sorry for myself that I’m missing all the people and activities that our conference offers. Sure, I could stream it online. I could listen to the content. Something about being present with four thousand of your people makes the experience more than a TED talk. I’d wander up to this window several times a day, looking at the landscape of life happening below, and feeling left out. Wondering what I was missing. Life happens whether we choose to engage in it or not. Some people decide to stay behind a window, safe, protected from what they don’t know, becoming a personal silo so they can’t be hurt. I grew up in the Midwest, so I know what a silo is. These cylindrical structures are used to store excess grain and silage; during years of bumper crops, these structures work well to hold the extra yield. The first indication of such storage places is found in Genesis 41 when Joseph helps Pharaoh save the extra grain during seven years of plenty so the people may eat during the seven years of famine. Silos protect crops and silage (whole plants chopped fine to be fed to animals) from rot. It can’t protect from bugs and rats who find their way in to feast on what’s there. Vermin always find their way to available food. I’m fortunate. I’ll be able to rejoin humanity in a few days. I know I need people in my life to remind me of who I am and who I’m part of. Others give me perspective on me so I don’t get stuck in managing an image that isn’t real. Covid forced us into isolation. Some people got stuck there, overwhelmed by aloneness, and undone by the despair that loneliness brings. We’re made to live with others in a community. To encourage and uplift one another for our health, sanity, and the glory of God. “Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of His return is drawing near.” Hebrews 10:24-25 Life can’t be spent hiding behind a window, not even a social media window, where people only show what they choose and not all who they are, where the option of looking out keeps us from focusing on what’s happening within. Social media, like all silos, can allow those rats and bugs of lies and deceit to affect our minds and thoughts if we’re not careful. The slow infection of our hearts from what we let others say about us. God is about our wholeness, our shalom–helping us be all we can be in Him. We need to let Him in–not keep Him behind glass. He sees us clearly and hiding behind a window of what we think others can see doesn’t keep His loving eyes from finding us. Seeing us. Nobody can maintain perfect windows. We need to chosse to abandon our silos.