Communion

October 3 & 4, 2015

In our home, Celina has put up family pictures everywhere. In fact, we have an entire wall in our dining room devoted to pictures of our family interspersed with words that define family.  In fact, you might say the pictures and words reveal our family values. They are pictures of camping trips, family reunions, birthdays, and posed family photos. The words displayed are things like Love, Joy, Patience, Laughter, Strength, and Kindness.  We look at these pictures and words every day.  In fact, we are so familiar with them they have lost some of their ability to evoke cherished memories or remind us of the things we value the most in life.  They certainly still portray these events and values accurately but our over familiarization with them has unintentionally desensitized us, and they no longer effect our heart as deeply as they did when we put them up.  It’s not that the memory is diminished or we cherish them less.  It’s not even that we take them for granted; nor have we lost our love and fondness for the people and memories captured in them.  It’s just that we walk by them in our busy life every day and rarely stop to take the time to pause and reflect.  We rarely pause long enough to allow those pictures to return us to those places in our memory, to re-experience those moments and enjoy their sweetness again.
 
Communion can be a lot like those pictures in our home. Depending on how we participate in this significant and meaningful act of worship, we can either become desensitized to its significance by our familiarity, or we can enter into it and be carried back to a time when its meaning and significance were first enjoyed.  
 
Join us this weekend as we reflect on the meaning and significance of Communion and ask God to remind us of his great love for us.
 
--Kap Otten