October 16, 2022 - INSCRIPTIONS FROM THE HEART

By Pastor Immanuel Garcera

This past week we’ve tackled committing to community for the BEING Challenge. Hope you’ve been keeping up! If not, there’s always time to catch up! Community is something so integral to our faith walk that I truly believe, a follower of Christ can’t reach their full potential without a body of believers around them. Sure, you can get by, by yourself, but with many hands, so much more work can be done!

I like to see this life as a big task, a big race we’re all trying to run -- as much as I want to carry my own weight, and run my own race, it’s also nice to know there are others running with me and help. If you read the book, you’ll know just how much our inner circle influences us -- good and bad. So, it’s a good idea to ask: “who is my inner circle” and “how are they influencing me?” What I love about the church is that overall, the people in it are meaning good toward others and they aim to serve and bring value to others. Yes, the church has its problems, and people are broken, but overall I believe as broken as we are, we’re at least broken together, striving for Christ together.

The account of the paralytic man and his friends comes to mind (Luke 5:17-29). The paralytic man probably couldn’t have done it on his own but thankfully he had determined friends that literally and figuratively carried him along for a better chance of a future. The friends helped the man go to Jesus. My question is, do our current close associations desire the same for us? What another good, but difficult question to ask: “are those individuals closest to me, leading me to Jesus?”

To God be the glory!