Do we care?

God said, "it is not good for man to be alone." We are social creatures and how ever hard we try, it is just not pleasant or comfortable, nor agreeable to our nature to be alone. We are made in the image of God. God is the Holy Community of Three and God is one God. We are made to be the body of Christ to uphold and encourage one another. We may not admit it at times but we need each other, and oh how we need each other.

However, sometimes we are set in a system and we are expected to operate like clockwork. If it works don't fix it. But just like any gear or mechanism in any system, if there is no servicing, no oiling, no maintenance check, no tuning, it will breakdown - sometimes even to the point of no return.

Just take the example of something almost all of us own or use - our cars. At the point of purchase, we expect it to be reliable and we know we can depend on it to run as long as we give it enough fuel. We wash it, we tend to it, we bring it for frequent service and maintenance checks. We listen to it, we give it a good look once in awhile. We handle with care, we know how far it can go and how much we can push. We give it our time, we put in our effort and we give it good tender loving care. We do that because we expect it run and we want it to work without stalling on us at anytime in our course of life.

We do that with our cars but how miserably we fail with the people around us.

We expect them to run like clockwork. We expect them to be where we expect them to be. As long as they are laughing, as long as they are smiling or even just being there, we think they are doing great, we think they are doing fine.

But do we listen, do we care, do we love?

We know full well that if we do not bring in our cars for frequent wash, for its schedule maintenance service, if we do not listen to it to see if it needs some care and some fixing up, and the most obvious of all, if we do not pay good attention to the fuel indicator, it will give up on us and just stop working one day.

Similarly, if we do not bring our family members, our friends, our churchmates, our neighbour, our colleagues or anyone in our community for frequent conversation, if we do not listen to their hearts, if we do not pay good attention to their needs, they will give up on us. But that is where the similarity ends. If our cars don't work anymore, great - we discard them and get a new one. God help us when we lose the people we love and the people we care so much about.

pearlie