Partnership
We were quite a pair.
At my last church, there were five of us on staff, two full-time people, me and the secretary and three part-time ministers. One of the part-time pastors was Dr. McGuffin, a semi-retired pastor who’d spent the bulk of his ministry pastoring in New Mexico and California. He did some of the preaching and most of the ministry with the Senior Adults in the church. But his greatest contribution was the almost weekly trips he and I would take together to the Pecos River to hunt for ‘bows. To this day I miss fishing for rainbow trout in New Mexico. I still read the fishing reports for the area on the Internet several times a year.
Because we both loved the outdoors and enjoyed playing dominos, we spent a good bit of time together. One afternoon we decided to go to a drive-through burger stand for lunch. At the time, I hated drive-through windows because it was after I lost my voice to thyroid cancer, but before God restored it through the work of an innovative surgeon. I couldn’t speak loud enough to order, but Mac said he’d do the ordering if we’d go. Good plan, I thought, until we got there.
You see Mac’s hearing was about as good as my speaking was at the time. Because he could see my lips when I spoke, he could still understand me, but he could’nt read the lips of the person taking our order. The person taking our order couldn’t hear me talk to Mac and grew a bit impatient with our delays in answering him and several times interrupted me while I was talking to Mac. It was clumsy, but together we were able to place the order.
I was his ears. He was my voice. As I said, we were quite a pair.
In the body of Christ, we need both ears and voices. There needs to be those who are hearing what God is saying to His church and those who will speak God’s message to the world. It may be the same person. Or it may not. But working together, we can get the job done.
Jim L. Wilson, Fresh Start Devotionals (Fresno, CA: Willow City Press, 2009).
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