This weekend I traveled to Nashville & Mississippi to visit family of whom I have no working memory.
It turns out that my grandmother was one of nine children, all of whom either live in the same town they grew up in, or within just a couple of hours of it.We stayed in a home that has been the home for family gatherings, and when great-uncle Thomas passed away last summer, it was purchased by a sister to keep in the family.
This is the family of storybooks.
I met great aunts and uncles, second cousins and third cousins, and heard about every possible southern drawl that there can be.
My mom had been down to this small town in northeastern Mississippi every summer until she was 22, and then once her mother died, she took a nineteen year break until this trip. I saw her blend into a puzzle that I didn't know she was missing.
There were things that made sense in that context that didn't make sense when you look at the members of my family in isolation. Take, for example, my older brother's build. My parents, my twin, and I all have similar body builds, . He, however, is built like a wall, which comes from neither of my parents. My great-aunts threw us a cook-out on Saturday, and there were at least three men there that were built exactly the same way. As my mom showed off pictures of my family to them, the women were quick to exclaim that he favored the Wilson side of the family, which would be my grandmother's side.
This got me thinking.
1 Corinthians 12 talks about the body of Christ, particularly in reference to the spiritual gifts and how all are needed and good. Verses 14-20 speak about how each individual member works together to create the larger body of Christ: "For the body does not consist of one member but of many...If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body."
Verses 21 through the end of the chapter discuss the importance of unity among all of those individual members. Verses 26 and 27 capture it succinctly: "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it."
You see, the gift of prophecy wouldn't make sense if there weren't members to receive it. The same goes for healing or miracles or teaching or administration or hospitality (or hugs, which seem to be a spiritual gift Paul forgot to mention). Each of these gifts is important and helps build the body in very different ways. But you isolate them, and they're not as strong. They're a puzzle piece without the puzzle to surround them, and well, a single puzzle piece doesn't really show you much of the picture. You piece them all together, allow each little gap to be filled, and all of a sudden you've got the whole message.
We need each individual member of the body to complement one another because together, whole, we reflect Christ, which leads to, as Paul ends in 1 Corinthians 12, "...a still more excellent way."
