So I’ve been doing some recording of my songs with my friend Jordan in his room, I call it the J-Dub Music Factory. It’s been a lot of fun, hearing something I wrote on a piano or guitar and adding more instruments to it is so cool to hear when it’s all put together.
The hardest part of it is when you hear what you just recorded played back, raw, unedited and with no accompaniments. You feel so exposed and nervous. Like a kid in middle school that just sent a note to a girl that says he likes her only to see her laugh at it with her friends while they point fingers towards me… I mean him. But anyways, you’re like, “Dang, that’s me? That sounds awful!” You hear yourself differently than you hear yourself singing in the shower. It’s pretty tough to hear, especially for a singer like me.
But what’s crazy is that after Jordan played the other instruments we’d recorded with me singing, it didn’t sound so bad. I was like, “Hey, I can actually listen to this. Not completely terrible.”
I think it’s the same thing with our daily lives in the Body of Christ.
Romans 12:4-5
“Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
It is my belief that there are no soloists in the Body of Christ. Sunday morning church may have told you differently. And trust me, I love Sister Maggie’s Sunday offering solo special as much as the next guy, but we’re not meant to sing our lives out alone. “Each member belongs to all the others,” we are each an instrument that was made to play in a glorious orchestra.
Just like the other instruments that were added helped to cover up the cracks, shallowness, and altogether weakness of my 12-year-old boy-like singing voice, as members in the Body we are meant to balance, protect, and uplift the other members.
Romans 12:15-16
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another.”
The Body is meant to care for the Body. Yet for so long we’ve been a masochistic body. Sometimes more than the world could ever hurt us, we’ve been hurting ourselves. Instead of rejoicing with those who rejoice, we get jealous. Instead of weeping with those who weep we say that they should get over it, or counsel them with all of our great wisdom and analyze their problems to death, when really they just need someone to listen to them.
A hand never goes to the places a foot has been. The foot was not really made to be a hand but got demoted; it was perfectly designed and placed by God to be a foot. A hand should not try to make a foot another hand. Nobody wants to try and eat a sandwich with a foot-hand. Gross. You’ve been perfectly designed and placed in the Body by God. Be who you are supposed to be in it! But the Body must work together.
I remember a Savior who was on his hands and knees as a servant, placing hands where feet step. I remember a Savior who was pierced in his hands and feet because he loved every part of the Body.
His body is our example, and we are his body. Really weep with those who weep. Really rejoice with those who rejoice. Be who you are in this great Body of Christ. Jesus told us to remember his body that was broken. So be pierced. Be humbled.
We are broken, and we belong to each other, and we all belong to Jesus. We are the body of a Savior who was “pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities,” but we are beautiful.
