09/06/2026
The Everything Drawer - Traveling with Paul
1 Corinthians 12:12-27
The other day I was looking for a battery. Not a big deal, just one of those small household annoyances where something has stopped working and you are convinced the solution is somewhere nearby.
So I opened “the drawer”. You know the one I’m talking about. Some might call it a junk drawer, I prefer to call it my Everything drawer. It’s the place where useful things go to be kept forever. So I moved aside a roll of tape, a few pens, an Allen wrench and a lone birthday candle. There were batteries in there, of course, but no way to know which still worked. I found a key that must unlock something, though no one could tell me what. It occurred to me that none of these things really belonged together. And yet there they were. And every once in a while, something in that everything drawer turns out to be exactly what I need.
I wonder if church is a little like that? Not because people are junk, obviously. Though some Sunday mornings before coffee, we all have our moments. But because church gathers together people who, on paper, may not have any other reason to be in the same room. We come from different generations, different families, different experiences. We see the world differently. We have different ways of talking, praying, serving, worrying, hoping, and showing love. And sometimes those differences can feel inconvenient. We tend to like things that match. We like categories. We like knowing where everything goes.
But Paul tells the church in Corinth that the church was never meant to work that way. A body does not work because every part is the same. It works because it isn’t. The eye cannot do what the hand does. The hand cannot do what the foot does. And none of them gets very far on their own.
His point is not simply that we should tolerate one another’s differences (that’s the bare minimum). The point is we actually need them. That person who sees the world differently from you may notice something you missed. The one who knows exactly what to do when someone is hurting quietly brings healing. The person who doesn’t fit neatly into our expectations may turn out to be holding something the whole community requires.
Maybe belonging means being gathered into something larger than ourselves and discovering there is room for what we carry. That is one of the gifts of church at its best. We do not have to be the same, nor do we have to be good at everything. We do not even have to fully understand what everyone else brings. We might learn to trust that God has gathered us together for a reason.
God keeps finding ways to make use of every one of us. Even the mystery key!
