Why We Keep Showing Up

Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good works, not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more, as you see the Day approaching. (Hebrews 10:24-25, WEB)

There is always a reason to skip the meeting. You are tired, you had a bad week, you do not feel like being around people, or you fell again and cannot imagine sitting in that room as if nothing happened, wearing a face that does not match what you did. The writer of Hebrews seems to have known men like this, because he does not treat gathering as something that happens automatically. Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, he writes, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.

He treats gathering as something that has to be protected, guarded against a drift he had clearly watched happen, because he knows how naturally men slip out of it and how reasonable each individual excuse can sound. The pull toward isolation is strongest exactly when you most need the room, on the weeks you feel least worthy to be there, when shame has convinced you that staying home is the honest thing to do. Those are the weeks to go anyway, especially those weeks. The point of showing up is not to perform your progress or to present a clean report. It is to be stirred, to have someone breathe a little courage back into you when your own has run low, to be reminded by their presence that you are still one of them.

If you have been drifting from your team, the enemy is happy to keep you home, happy to let each skipped meeting make the next one easier to skip. That is how the habit of some begins, not with a decision to quit but with a series of understandable absences. Go back this week, even ashamed, even with nothing good to report. Let God use the ordinary faithfulness of showing up to hold you, and let the men in that room do for you what you cannot do alone.