in and out

What's it like to be confined to the four walls of your own home? I guess you can't really know until you're in that position.

One of the people I called on this afternoon was chatting about just that. Confined for a while to her own home after an operation, she was simply longing to be able to get out and about again, meeting people, enjoying something beyond the familiar landscape of her own home.

It made me realise how basic that is to most of us, most of our lives. Home is great and we enjoy being there, no mistake: and yes, it's there we feel most safe and there that we relax and feel we're able just to be ourselves.

But once it becomes the be-all and end-all of our existence, we've lost it. When we reach the point we're comfortable with living life like that, stuck within the four same walls, day in, day out: and when we'd rather not go out and feel we couldn't cope with that at all - well, we've surely reached the point of what they usually call being 'institutionalised'.

It crossed my mind as she was chatting on about herself, that maybe that's too often what our following Jesus Christ has ended up being like. A tame, constricted version of the life we're meant to live. Institutionalised. Preferring to be stuck inside, unable to go out. Maybe that's the essence of the problem that we face.

When we're happy just to live out all our piety within the four safe walls of what we call the church: when we've lost that basic urge to get on out and live life to the full beyond those walls and mingle with the multitudes who walk the streets of life - when we reach that point then something's gone far wrong and ... well, we've lost it. Lost the plot and lost the life we're meant to live. And lost the very heart of what it's all about.

Our health is maybe measured best by just that simple longing to be 'out' instead of always safely 'in'.