a nosehair in the body of Christ

Ahh.. to be a nosehair in the body of Christ...

If you want to know what's going on with the "body," ask a nosehair. The vocation of the nosehair is to be at the periphery, on the edge... and yet a vital and growing (at least at my age!) part of the body... nosehairs PAY ATTENTION to what's going on outside the body (what's "in the air" all around?... what are the particles, the toxins, the signs of spring and new life? What should we be breathing in deeply? What should we be filtering out?), and to what's going on inside the body (as evidenced by what's coming out of it... need I say more...)

Sound like "nosehair as artistic vocation," perhaps?

Or maybe a better image for me, considering I was "on tour" for the past two weeks, would be of a single red blood cell, circulating through the body... entering into and interacting with various "vital organs" in different places... at once "belonging" and "coming from somewhere else"... maybe carrying just a little bit of oxygen that might help feed a tissue somewhere... and returning, spent, to be renewed and sent out again...

Here are just a couple of moments from the second week of my tour when this particular nosehair/red blood cell got a chance to interact with some different "vital organs" and caught a glimpse, again, of the diversity and vitality and struggle and life and work of the broader "body" in action...

- evening concert at Belmont Mennonite Church... last song of the evening, "Peace Be With You," and to my surprise the children already knew it, and were doing some actions for the song that I'd never seen before... so I invited them up to the front, and the children led us by singing this song together, doing the actions, and helping us all to "pass the peace"...

- afternoon conversation with Larry Miller, executive secretary of Mennonite World Conference, about his work of turning the eyes of the church in North America and Europe to the global South... and working at mechanisms like the Global Church Sharing Fund to help the worldwide church to be in solidarity and better distribute resources throughout the body...

- morning chapel, classes, and lunchtime conversation at AMBS... a powerful sense of inter-connectedness with the broader body in this seminary community that exists to prepare and send out women and men to lead and serve and care for the church... a chance to share my songs as resoures for that work, and to hear their feedback and encouragement and reflections...

- uproarious middle-of-the-night jam session at the DSC conference... after a great weekend of connecting with this community of artists that are passionate about Jesus and passionate about their art but who often feel significantly alienated from/disillusioned with/rejected by "the church"... times of conversation and prayer, a healing service... and then, in the middle of the night, hearing Jonathan and friends singing songs of love, of longing, of faith, of struggle that put words to what was going on in my soul, and all I could do was weep...

Having lived in many places, and travelled to many more, I have a profound sense of being most "at home" in the extended "body of Christ," and experiences like these remind me who I am, and who we are.

"For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ...

If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body...

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you...

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it..."

Sounds like good news for nosehairs/red blood cells like me. How does it sound to you?