Pastor's Corner: God values us doing life in community

Last Thursday was our ministerial association's first monthly meeting of the new school year, having taken a break for the summer months. The Greater Havre Area Ministerial Association's - G.H.A.M.A. - officers this school year are President Edroy "Curt" Curtis (me); Vice President Michael O'Hearn; Treasurers Father Dan Wathen and Tim Maroney; and Secretary Megan Hoewisch. Per usual, we encouraged our pastors and deacons to volunteer: to write articles for the Havre Daily News; to sponsor various Havre schools; and to function as law enforcement chaplains. We also heard updates with regards to the Feed My Sheep Soup Kitchen, the Havre Food Bank, the ongoing church services at the Northern Montana Care Center, the Salvation Army's ministries, and ministry at the detention center.

All of those items are important, but by far the most important thing that we did was to spend quality time personally sharing about our summer months and what is going on in each of our lives, and then determining to pray for each other and lift one another up as we move forward through these fall months.

I shared a devotion emphasizing the importance of our doing life together in community, and how much God values that for us. In Genesis 1-2, we read the creation account and how God planned for us to do life. If you haven't read it in a while, take a fresh look. It's an amazing reminded of God's endless capacities. With little effort but amazing creativity, God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. The breadth and depth of what He was able to get done in six days is sobering for any results-oriented, type-A personality. Talk about getting stuff done! But then again, He's God. There's no one like Him! In the midst of His creative bonanza, a recurring statement appears. In fact, six times after God created something, the text says, "God saw that it was good." From light to livestock, the assessment of His efforts was the same: it is good. He was pleased. It was all fine. Things were as he intended them to be. Genesis 1:31 - Then, on the sixth day, humankind came on the scene. The culmination of God's creativity had arrived. God was so pleased by this new creation that as He assessed His efforts over the previous six days, His appraisal changed. With the latest addition, the things He had created were no longer just good. They were now VERY GOOD! God's prized creation had tipped the scales. With the addition of humankind, God, at last, awarded His five-star rating.

Genesis 2:18 - But things changed quickly. After explaining in more detail His designs for humanity, God said, "It's not all good." Up to this point, everything had been as He intended.

However, in Genesis 2:18 God said that something wasn't right. Something wasn't good.

He specifically said, "It is not good for the man to be alone." For years, many of us have heard Genesis 2:18 quoted in the context of marriage - and rightly so. But I believe the implications go beyond an affirmation of the marriage relationship. At its core, this is a statement about the importance of connecting well with others, marriage being the most profound illustration of that reality. Loneliness was not good BEFORE the Fall of Man! The human being is in a state of perfect intimacy with God. Each word he and God speak with each other is filled with closeness and joy; he walks with God in the garden in the cool of the day. He is known and loved to the core of his being by his omniscient, love-filled Creator. Yet the word that God uses to describe him is "alone." And God says that this aloneness is "not good." Sometimes in church circles when people feel lonely, we will tell them not to expect too much from human relationships, that there is inside every human being a God-shaped void that no other person can fill. That is true. But: apparently according to the writer of Genesis, God creates inside this man a kind of "human-shaped void" that God Himself will not fill. In other words, while God made people for Himself, He also made us with a unique and real need for one another.

While Adam depended on a relationship with God for his everything, it was not good for him to be by himself. Man was incomplete with God alone. So we see at the outset that relationship was at the core of the way things were created. The point is that Adam needed more than what God could provide him. Part of what it means to be made in God's image is our capacity for connectedness. Adam was created for human connection. And we still are. When our "human-shaped void" is not filled, when we live alone, it is "not good." God values us doing life in community.

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Written by Rev. Edroy "Curt" Curtis. president of the Greater Havre Area Ministerial Association, chaplain of Northern Montana Health Care and lead pastor of Havre Assembly of God Church.

Devotion taken from the book "Creating Community" by Andy Stanley & Bill Willits (pages 13-15); copyright 2004, 2021 by North Point Ministries; Multnomah Publishing