Not one of us is complete. We like to think we are, but we are actually meant to be part of a much larger body that is animated by God. Each of us has needs greater than what we can meet on our own, and each of us has distinct and particular gifts that make sense only alongside the complementary gifts of others. Truly, we are all as specialized as the members of a human body, just as Paul described in the verse above. None of us is complete—even if we tend to live, labor, and worry as if this isn’t so.For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.
—I Corinthians 12:12
Rejecting the notion that we are incomplete is a part of rejecting God, the God who made us this way. That is why, whenever we get suckered into acting fully self-contained in our lives, the space in us that is meant to be filled with God ends up getting at least partly filled with something else. Usually it gets filled with such a proliferation of other things that it isn’t obvious what all we are worshiping. We submit to the wrong authorities and give our obedience to lifeless things. And, to some greater or lesser extent, we also try to be a god on our own. We face our fears and struggle to carry our hopes all by ourselves, seeing nothing that can face those fears or realize those hopes except for our desperate and lonely battling.
It is liberating to watch the curtain drawn open upon a radically different way.
An organ, a cell, a finger, an ear—all of them are pointless without the rest of the body, and all of them have needs they lay upon the rest of the body while proceeding to fully serve that body by carrying out the purpose for which they were made. The body works because of this. The body is elaborately resilient and adaptive because of this, and the body lives because of this.
In the same way, trusting in God means—at least in part—trusting in the material body of God on earth. That is, the body of all of his believers.
To say the least, this can be a challenge. That body includes petty and deficient human beings such as me. But then, I might find every one of the processes and vital organs of my own human body pretty unsightly up close, if I stared at them without appreciation.
The sweep of time shows a different view. The body of believers has given the world institutions of healing and learning that are now so weighty, influential, and solid that we don’t even remember they were founded on faith.
The scope of mercy shows a different picture, too. Throughout the world, it is the body of believers in Christ that is joyfully willing to do the most thankless and unknown work of rescuing the orphaned and poor. Jesus did predict, in John 14:12, that we would do even greater works on the earth than he did.
There is this popular-psychology term “codependent” that gets used broadly, describing an unhealthy emotional addiction. Similar as it might sound to the way of surrender, this is not the way of Christ—and in fact it is nearly the antithesis. In place of trying to sustain an incomplete shard of self, Jesus proposes trusting in Christ to make you a part of his completeness. When you surrender to God, and I surrender, and she surrenders too—God uses every one of us together within a web of life and love to spread the Lord’s gifts throughout creation.
Without the surrender to God, mere dependence is just a way to slavery. Mere independence is a way to the same slavery, because this is the illusion that seduces us into dependence.
God’s way is an abundant interdependence, and to have this, we discover, is to find answers to many of the most gnawing questions about who we are and what will become of us. The greater part of those answers is found in the comfort that we don’t need the answers—not all of them—in order to grow and proceed. We settle naturally and freely into our own various roles as elements of the working of God on earth. We allow others to do the same alongside us. And as we turn our hearts and tune those hearts toward something larger, all of it starts to click together more often than it seemingly should. We are encouraged by the joyful glimpses we sometimes see into the ways that things surprisingly make sense after all.
