Church as a PogoBal?

  When I was a child, I received as a gift a PogoBal – this was a torturous device sold as a toy: with a figure-8 rubber ball bisected by a thick round disk. You were meant to balance your weight on the disk while squeezing your feet into the spherical ball on opposite sides, and bounce (like a pogo stick). It required a feat of balance, coordination, spatial awareness, and some athleticism: it didn’t take long to get tired on these things.

This was the device that really confirmed that I was not blessed with great balance! However, I was determined to figure it out. Many hours were spent trying to master the correct way to start bouncing, and the best way to get off, and how to avoid obstacles… Some of my friends could bounce up and down the street on these things, and connect in groups for tricks: I merely tried to minimise the number of times I fell.

I was thinking about these things recently, as it feels like we, as a society, have been on a COVID PogoBal for some time. And while we’re trying to bounce along, life has not been too easy! For many of us, our daily routine has had to change – drastically. As rules and restrictions change and are imposed, people are not all responding calmly; as fear increases, people are not all acting kindly; as insecurity and “the great unknown” continue, people are not all people are exuding the confident community spirit we aimed for 18 months ago.

Yet: we’re still bouncing. Studies show that people of faith tend to mitigate life’s storms better, and that those who held social connections in their faith community coped best of all. So despite the months of instability, we have done all we can to keep one another up: we as the church have worked to be a stabilising and consistent support.

And though we are all weary of this, we do not have to be alone in it. We can continue to reach out to one another, to encourage one another, to pray with one another, to journey with one another. Like children on PogoBals, we are all experiencing life with different levels of difficulty. Our challenge, despite being tired, is to retain a faithful hope of a positive near future, and to continue the good work of bouncing along together.