Paul speaking to the church in Ephesus: This is a church in utter persecution from every side. John is delivering a message of hope and comfort to stay the course…but there’s a twist:
“You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” Revelation 2: 3-5a NIV
*Record scratch.*
What? What could that possibly mean that they had “forsaken the love they had first?”
Well, a new relationship is like traveling to a foreign country: You notice every street sign. The shape of every building. Every flower is the most exotic thing. The smell of food from that bistro is irresistible.
Then, as you become accustomed to a place, you begin to think of other things when you walk around town: You don’t notice the buildings so much. You’ve eaten at the bistro twice. And the flower is drooping.
I was thinking about “familiarity” after taking an Uber recently with an Ethiopian driver. I mentioned something about the church in Ethiopia being older than the church in Europe, and immediately our conversation took on the momentum of a snowball on a steep mountainside: Before long, we were discussing the Queen of Sheba’s encounter with King Solomon, about family in far-flung places, making long journeys, of tragedy and strife, deep broken hearts, and what gives us courage to keep going.
When I got out of the car from that ten-minute drive up Broadway, I felt dizzy like I’d just landed here. Everything felt prickly and bright. I’d never seen the Groove Subaru sign look so darn fancy. I wanted to hug the mechanic in dirty coveralls coming to receive my car.
Waiting around in the lobby area, I did refrain from hugging people. But I was thinking how you can talk to a stranger sometimes and be more sociable than with someone you know intimately, because you listen to them so very carefully. There is no subtext to draw from. There is only appreciation for this one human being you don’t yet know at all.
What did Jesus mean when He said “Do the things you did at first”? How do we obey that directive? How did we deeply appreciate the God we can’t even begin to understand yet at all?
Sometimes I think we presume to think we have hit the mark. We think that we are meeting our obligations. We are completing our tasks. We are giving what we are supposed to give, and we have met expectations. But maybe in all the doing, giving, and completing, we missed something God misses dearly.
Maybe God wants our surprise and delight in Him that we had at the start. Do we do too much of the talking in prayer? Maybe He would like us to listen in the way we would listen to someone we don’t know yet. Maybe He wants to be seen by us with the same rapt attention we give that flower in a far-off country.
And maybe in our daily contact with people we see often, we could take a moment to look at them as if for the first time – to be truly with them, like you have ten minutes in an Uber together and will never see them ever again.
by Carie Grant
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