The Big Picture

Last week I went to Territorial Head Quarters for my induction as DYO. The two days were filled with meeting the ALOVE team and getting to know the bigger picture of youth work in The Salvation Army in the UK. We got to know the vision and strategy for the next five years, and it is very exciting! We were also able to share our own vision of the work in our own divisions; and discovered that these fitted into the bigger picture of work across the country.

Visiting THQ for this purpose really helped me find my place within the structure of The Salvation Army, and understand my role and purpose here. While I knew about ALOVE and some of the support they could offer, I did not know or understand how I fitted into that or where to start. Now, I have developed a deeper understanding and feel fired up for the future of work with young people in Anglia and across the rest of the UK.

Often in life, we focus on those tasks in front of us. We forget to spend time looking at the big picture and taking action, instead reacting to the immediate, small concerns of our lives. This can lead us to feel like we are constantly fighting fires, without knowing or understanding the cause. As well as fighting the fires, we need to step back to find the cause and do something about that.

In our spiritual lives, we can find ourselves thinking only of the here and now, and what is directly affecting us. We can become disheartened, as we lack the knowledge of what God is doing on a wider scale. We can fail to see the opportunities he is sending us as we are too focused on the small things. The other danger is that we can see our part as being too small, or too insignificant, and withdraw ourselves.

Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honour just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?

The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything.

(1 Corinthians 12:12 – 27, The Message)

I challenge you to pray that God will reveal the ‘big picture’ to you, that you will understand how you fit into the ‘body of Christ’, and that you will see and grab hold of the opportunities he gives you to get involved. If you have any stories of times you have done this, please share them in the comments. It would be wonderful to hear them!