The pages of my fairly new journal are already coming loose.
And, yes, I can relate to falling apart, coming loose. I fall away. I try putting my life back together, but I discover that some areas of my life are still out of order. Sometimes I’m not sure where I fit in.
I’ve been using different size paperclips to keep the journal together. Small paperclips hold together a clump of loose pages, and larger paperclips attach those smaller bundles to the sturdy cover.
This whole thing is a picture of why we need each other. When I come loose and feel like I’m falling apart, I need to be attached to others. Sometimes I’m bundled together with others who have also come loose. We gather together as each of us confesses to the ways we have individually come undone. It is actually our “undone-ness” that we have in common and that paradoxically brings us back together.
This reunited sense of order and togetherness is good, but incomplete by itself. Just as larger paperclips hold a small group of loose papers to the sturdy cover, I need to find ways to also connect with people who have a stronger, more mature hold on Christ. I like attachment to that small, select group of others with whom I share so much in common, but I need to cling to a larger community – to the Book as a whole.
It is in this broader, big paperclip way that I realize that I as an individual page am graciously included in the larger story of God that He began writing thousands of years ago.
excellent! i need paperclips at this moment in my life. I need a paperclip for “family”. do you have one I could borrow for awhile?
Don’t you just enjoy those paperclips that come in various colors? They show the divesity we have in the body of Christ. There are days when we need the serious colored ones and then there are days we need to be around the cheerfully colored ones.
I have been doing some more thinking about your paperclip post. To add to what I commented earlier: sometimes I need the paperclip of a Joel Osteen and other times I need the paperclip of a Charles Stanley.
Reminds me of that hymn, “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds”, which might be sung “Blessed be the Paperclip that Binds” (“our hearts in Christian love…”). Thanks for keeping us thinking, Gary.