Before the industrial revolution, no one had a gym membership – do you know why? Because everything required manual labor, so they all were ripped.
This week, we have no kids, so we’ve been doing work around the compound. The first couple of days I was helping out in the farm area, cleaning out stalls. That’s hard work. You start by convincing the goats that they would rather be in a different pen, which involved carrying or dragging them from the stall to the pen. Then you get a pitchfork and scoop out the straw. The top layer isn’t bad, but the lower layers of straw are wet from water and urine, so a scoop of straw is decently heavy. Once all of the straw is out, you switch to a shovel and scrape out the dirt and feces. When that is done, you transition to a hand-held scraper to get the pockets of dirt that had fossilized on the floor (we’ll pretend that it was only dirt). When the muck and dirt had been removed to a reasonable extent, you grabbed a brush and scrubbed down the walls. When the walls were prepared, you whitewashed them all. By the time we got to whitewashing, I had switched to a different task, but I got to experience all of the previous steps.
The next couple of days I spent on hedge removal duty. There were a few dozen hedges that had gotten diseased and needed to be removed. Not simply trimmed back – removed, roots and all. That pretty much involved hacking the bush down to a collection of stumps with a hatchet or a tool that looked like a scythe but only a small portion of the curve, the blade probably was 8-10 inches long. When you got enough of the hedge removed, you switched to a sort of pickaxe to dig out the root ball. Do this for several hours a day in the sun and you’ll never need to go to the gym or the tanning salon again.
So what happened? We went from being in shape for our lives just by going about our daily tasks to paying someone to do those tasks and then paying a gym to let us get ourselves in shape. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that the conveniences that we have in the developed world today are wonderful things, and specialization of tasks is beneficial for all involved. That said, there is a difference between convenience and laziness.
But that is a different discussion, what I really want to ask is when did we transition as the Church? Sometime between the first century and now, we went from getting involved personally in the advancement of the Kingdom to going on Sunday morning, giving some money, and feeling good because somebody would do something with our donation. We have the same Holy Spirit within us that the apostles received at the day of Pentecost, so why do so many of us feel as though just giving money once a week (which we are called to do anyway) is sufficient?
Let me be clear – I’m not suggesting that everyone must be a missionary, or go on foreign missions, or become a preacher. Not at all. There are plenty of opportunities to advance the Kingdom in our own backyards. Some of us are called to teach Sunday School. Some are called to volunteer at the food bank. Some are called to build homes for the downtrodden. And some are called to foreign missions. Our Kingdom Callings are between us and God, but I think it’s about time we all got involved directly with advancing the Kingdom. How jacked and tan would the Church be if everyone exercised in his or her Kingdom Calling, rather than paying someone else to do it for them? Can you imagine what this world would be like if every person who claimed to follow Christ personally invested in His Kingdom?
