“Is Your Faith in A Box or In Use?”

These are my thought for this coming Sunday, the 2^nd Sunday after the Epiphany (Year C), January 20, 2019 and will be on the back page of the bulletin at Fishkill UMC.

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Some years ago, in response to a post on my blog related to science and faith, someone suggested that my PhD from Iowa was fake.  Somehow this individual felt that one could not be a scientist (in my case, a chemist) and a Christian.  And if you could, you needed to keep them in separate boxes, so they didn’t “disturb” each other.  We all know people like that today, whose actions and words during the week are a far cry from what they say and do on Sundays.  And unfortunately, this separation of secular and sectarian activities is far more common than we would like to think.

Putting things in boxes is a good way to store them but you often forget what you put in what box and even where you put the boxes.  And what is stored away quickly becomes out of date and nothing more than faded memories.

Our faith was never meant to be used occasionally, only to be brought out on special days and our skills were not meant to be just learned and then put away.  Our faith was meant to be used every day and we can always find ways to use our skills, even if not in the way we might have once thought.  The world and society around us change each day and we would be ill-prepared to deal with such changes otherwise.

Our skills are the best way we to express our faith and our faith is expressed in the skills that we have been given.

So, let us take our skills and faith out of the boxes we have stored them in and use them every day so that others may find Christ, the source of gifts and faith, and their own skills.

~~Tony Mitchell

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