A Living Sacrifice

by David A. Phillips

Often on a particularly stressful day, I will go to a nursing home or to the home of one of our church’s shut-ins. Whatever is causing the stress keeps me from concentrating on sermon preparation or background reading, so I try to do some small, good thing. It works every time: I spend an hour listening to the stories that folks want to recall and share. Some are happy stories from the past, others an acknowledgment of losses that remain. If the conversation is long enough, usually both stories emerge. The shared life—with all of its mountains and valleys—is the good life.

On one particularly stressful day, I went for a walk instead. The stress was rising up out of a place where we in the RCA uniquely walk. It is hard for us who believe that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” really means all. But since it does, and includes you and me, we find it hard to live in covenantal relationship with one another. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that we are like porcupines on a winter night. We either suffer alone in the cold or we end up poking each other in an attempt to stay warm. Things in my classis were feeling prickly...

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