This past week, I tuned in to this global church conference livestream, and one of the things that stood out was this short video that was played near the end. It’s a song written by the Indonesian attendees for the Japanese church. One of their lyrics was “We kept the shape but lost the heart.”
I think it resonated with me because sometimes we try to “keep the shape” in the sense of conforming to norms of society or what a “good christian” should look like, or just maintaining the status quo in our lives and spiritual journeys. Sure, we can survive, make it work, and maybe keep things looking “normal”(whatever that means), but in the process, we lose our heart for God and others. We might get so wrapped up in being or looking a certain way that we forget the God in it all. We might even become like the Pharisees in the Bible who were so absorbed in tradition and rules that they missed Jesus right in front of them.
My takeaway from this for now is to examine yourself and see where you are in your relationship with God. Are you closer to a “keep the shape” or “keep the heart” mode? Perhaps a way forward is to remember that Jesus came for the broken, and that we should run to Him with our brokenness instead of staying away and trying to fix or mask it. With Him, there is no need to maintain a “shape”.