I had the opportunity recently to go up to Crossroads Camp and Conference Center in Lowesville, VA for the Gathering of Silence hosted by the Virginia Baptist Epiphany Institute of Spirituality and sponsored by the WMU of Virginia. This week has become for me a fantastic time to get away for a few days and, in the silence, refocus on God in the midst of a busy, noisy world. Let me also add that Crossroads could not be a more perfect place to hold this gathering. If you have not been there the setting is breathtakingly beautiful—particularly in mid-October when the glories of fall have fully set in. When you add to that the fact that there is no cell phone service on the mountain you have the makings of a perfect getaway time. Whether you, reader, go up for next year’s Gathering or simply schedule an event there between now and then with whatever group you manage to put together, you need to get up to Crossroads for a few days and soak in the Holy Spirit surrounded by the resplendent beauty of creation.
All of that being said, I actually do have more of a purpose for writing than merely unpaid advertising for Crossroads and EIS (although I do that gladly). I actually wanted to show what can come from taking time out to merely observe rather than actively taking part. As I was on a solitary hike through the woods one morning I was treated to an illustration on the importance of the Christian community.
For most of the hike, the path looked a little like this:
Beautiful, but brown. That’s nature’s monochrome. After a while you start to get used to it and it all just fades into the background.
But somewhere along the trail something caught my eye. Something stood out as different. There was a leaf on the path that didn’t look like the others. It stood out like…a light on a hilltop for all to see. You couldn’t not see this leaf. It added a welcome splash of color to an otherwise monochrome world. It was jarring and demanded the attention of my eyes.
Soon, though, I began to see more. And whereas one red leaf created an eye-trap, two began to change the whole picture. Now they couldn’t be ignored as a mere fluke. With two leaves standing together you had the beginnings of a pattern, something to break up the monotony of brown. It wasn’t perfect yet, it might still be an extremely unusual fluke, but there was some hope. There was some color that brought warmth and joy to the otherwise colorless scene.
As I continued hiking, it gradually became clear that this was no fluke. There was something more going on. I saw red leaf after red leaf after red leaf. And this went beyond a mere pattern. Indeed, there was no sameness beyond color to the leaves. They were resting all over the path facing every direction possible, some close together, some further apart. But the total effect changed the whole picture. Now instead of uniform, lifeless brown, there was life. There was color. The joy and hope, so tantalizingly fleeting with but one or two leaves became a permanent fixture. The monochrome was transformed and the new picture was stunning.
To the untrained eye, to the quick glance, the path was still merely covered with leaves. The sound of my feet plodding down the path had not changed and yet nothing was the same anymore. A certain vibrancy had entered the picture that made things feel somehow lighter, fuller, more real.
Perhaps you can already see where this is going? When Jesus looked out at the crowd gathered before Him as He was giving the Sermon on the Mount one of the first things He said to them was this: You are the light of the world. Well obviously there’s a lot of commentary that could be offered on this announcement by Jesus. Light does a lot of different things. It revels truth. It illuminates the path forward. It drives out darkness. But, chemically speaking, one of the important things light does is to allow for the existence of color. Colors can’t happen without light. Colors happen when different materials absorb certain wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum and reflect others. The more strongly a certain material reflects a certain wavelength, the richer, deeper, and more vibrant is the color.
As one of the participants in the Gathering of Silence liked to say, “This is a metaphor.” The impact of a single follower of Christ acting as light is to create a jarring disjunction with the world around her. She stands out as something different in an unexpected, but powerfully attractive way. When you gather two or three together the effect becomes even stronger. Now instead of simply a splash of hope in a monochrome world there is the promise of a pattern. When the effect is magnified out to a whole body of Jesus followers—the church—the picture is transformed. There is no more uniformity. The monochrome is infused with a canvas of color that brings life, warmth, joy, hope, and love to a world which lacks all of those on its own. The beauty that the church brings to this world is simply unmatched by anything else in it. There is a kind of beauty to the world because it reflects the glory of its Creator, but the church adds nuance and depth that isn’t otherwise there. The church, then, is the hope, the color, the life and light of Christ in the world. When we stand together and reflect more of His light the color becomes richer, deeper, more vibrant.
And to think, if we would take solitary walks in the woods a little more often, we could see this with even greater clarity.