Church in a Time of Illness

Well, this last week was terrible.

I say that without hyperbole. There I was last Wednesday, minding my own business, when I walked into a downstairs bedroom that smelled like something had died, and found the carpet soaking wet. Then, for fun, twenty-four hours later I had a rare form of pink eye that made my face swell to the point that I was unrecognizable. My iPhone couldn't verify who I was. Neither could I. To make matters worse, my wife and daughter were on a trip together, which left me with my three youngest.

What happened next is the part I want to tell you about.

These kinds of relationships are soft contacts — people you've come to know not through a single dramatic moment but through the slow accumulation of ordinary proximity. The weekly handshake. The hallway conversation that goes nowhere in particular. The Sunday where you end up at the same table and talk about nothing important and somehow leave knowing each other a little better. These are the kinds of relationships Covid quietly gutted. We kept seeing each other on screens that gave us the illusion of connection. Remote church-going is spiritual isolation. We just stopped bumping into each other.

I've been bumping into people for a while now.

A few months ago, Nick Vale mentioned he was doing handyman work. Nick has served in our youth ministry. He has cared for one of my kids in meaningful ways. He's a cancer survivor. And he's the only guy I know who delivered his own child because he didn't drive fast enough to the hospital. This is all just part of knowing him. But he was my first call when I found the wet carpet. He came within 24 hours, demoed the bedroom, found black mold, and got to work. I gave him my garage code without a second thought. That kind of trust doesn't come from a transaction. It accumulates.

I went to the doctor, and the person who cared for me was Sarah Mahoney. I've had the joy of watching her and her husband welcome two children, with a third on the way. Her husband is also a semi-above-average fisherman who sends me hunting photos of questionable taste. Little details over time — and when the receptionist asked if I wanted to see Sarah, it was a happy, "Yes."

When things got worse, I texted Russell Swan — an eye doctor in our church — who happened to be in Nebraska at the time. Two days later, he stepped off a plane and came directly to my house. Our kids share a lot of the same homeschool activities. I know his family. He knows mine. He didn't need a referral. He just came.

I'm not sharing these names because you know these people. You don't. But I want you to know that people like them exist — and that they exist because of the local church. Then there were the friends who laughed with me at my face as well as the senior saint who tried to drop off a meal on the way to a cardiology appointment. These connections didn't just happen to me because I'm a pastor. There are hundreds of similar stories I could probably find in any healthy congregation.

Hebrews 10 tells us not to give up meeting together, and gives a reason that we often rush past: "but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching." The encouragement isn't incidental to the gathering. It is the gathering. Every Sunday you show up is a deposit into something you may not need to draw from for years. And then your face swells shut and you find out what you've been building.

The beauty of the church is not primarily its programs or its budget or its vision statement. It's this: there is an implicit trust, a genuine mutual care, a web of people who have seen each other through enough ordinary weeks that when something extraordinary happens, they already know where to show up. This is what the gospel does! If Nick or Sarah or Russell called me in a crisis, I would drop what I was doing. One day they probably will. That's just what the body does for itself.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12 that the parts of the body that seem weaker are actually indispensable — that God has arranged the members of the body so that there is no division, but that the members have the same care for one another. "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together." I suffered last week. Christians came to my aid.

That is not an accident. That is the church working exactly the way it was designed to.