Meetings

A week of meetings – hour after hour, day after day – is the wake of my week. I had been looking to this week in dread of a looming inability to get anything done thanks to the quantity of meetings.

The word means the “act of coming together” or and “assembly” or a place or point of contact. After completing a week of meetings, I’m drained of life and sapped of excitement. Yes, I came together with others. Yes, I was part of a large body. Yes, contact was established. However, relationship does not always result from “meeting.” Relationship goes beyond introduction, beyond contact, and beyond the surface to a deeper level of community.

Certainly things were done or accomplished at one level. Information is exchanged and contact is maintained and tasks are delegated; yet people remain disconnected. I fear that the weekly or daily encounters in our lives are often not more than a mere rendezvous.

A parallel might be drawn with meeting God. We have those points of ‘meeting’ God at church, in a Sunday School class, through a quiet time, or some other ritual point of contact. But what is the connection or disconnection created by these meetings.

Meeting is different than communing. To commune with someone is to “talk together usually with profound intensity” or “to be in intimate communication or rapport.” Today I am thinking more about what our lives would look like when large groups of people communed with God and one another. I wonder what small groups of people would look like who communed with God and each other.

Meeting and communing are worlds apart.