When we were in Belize this past spring, my family and I went tubing in some caves. We went deep into those caves, floating on inner tubes, clambering over rocks, edging along ledges with stalactites dripping. Our only lights were the powerful headlamps we each had affixed to our helmets. At one point, our guide had us turn off our headlamps. As he pointed out, the darkness was complete. There was absolutely no daylight, so our eyes would never adjust. Then he asked one of us to turn on his light. And the difference between absolute darkness and one light was incredible. We were standing on a slippery, rocky, uneven floor, with shallow pools of water a few feet away. The prospect of taking even one step in that darkness was terrifying. That terror immediately disappeared with just one light. As each of us turned on our lights, the light became stronger and the details around us clearer. The confidence to walk around that cave returned.
Recently, I spent some time praying about Church. I wanted to really understand Mary Baker Eddy’s description of Church, which she calls, in part, “the structure of Truth and Love,” and see how it applied to my individual expression of Church (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 583). At the time, I was serving on the board of my branch church. We had settled into a newly renovated space and had released our part-time secretary. Church was beginning to feel like a morass of administrative detail.
Then I thought of our branch churches as being like those lights in the cave. One little light immediately dispelled the darkness. But to fulfill the mission of Church to heal all humanity and deliver the world from sin and death, we need a lot of lights. Coming together in our commitment to Church by joining The Mother Church and serving in its branches, we are like the gathering of many lights, which illuminate the whole universe. This insight made the connection for me between the spiritual sense of Church and the church institution, and completely dispelled the sense of burden I felt about serving in church.
