When my beautiful wife and I first got married, we bought a nice three bedroom house in a neighborhood that was built in the 1940's. We had a nice corner lot with a large backyard and four large oak trees. We were happy until we found out we weren't the first ones to live there.
We began to come under assault from squirrels. Often I swore that there were thousands of them. They would chew or scratch their way through the soffets and make there home in our attic, not just in our attic, in the attic space above our bedroom.
I replaced some of the soffets with new freshly painted boards. I left for some errands only to come home and find my brand new, freshly painted soffet had a squirrel sized hole.
From that moment, I armed myself with a pellet gun. I began to take the squirrels out. My neighbors would see me tromping around the front yard setting traps and holding a pellet gun. No doubt they were worried about my sanity.
My obsession to destroy the squirrels was so strong that even my 5 year old daughter when shown a "cute squirrel" in kindergarten remarked that squirrels were "for killing." Yet my obsession to keep them out of the house did not result in my success. I could kill a few and chase them from the front yard, but they would come in from the side. When I chased them from the side, they would come in the back or the front or the other side. There was only one of me, and I couldn't keep them out from all sides of the house.
The house is the life God gives us, and the squirrels are Satan. He wants to get inside our lives and nest in our attics. He is relentless. He will find the soft boards or weaknesses he can push through, or he will use our arrogance that we fixed the problem to chew right through the patch with which we cover the hole.
It's our Christian community that we should call on. If I had called on several friends to surround my house and kill all the squirrels that came into the yard. The squirrels would be running from one corner of the house and right into the waiting sights of another squirrel hunter. Our church community is the friends we station around our house. They can help us be ever viligant for the Deceiver.
A strong community that is well relied upon can help keep Satan and his assaults at bay, or they can join together to help clear our lives of Satan and repair the damage he dealt and secure the premises from him.
This community is not concerned with how you paint your house or what flowers adorn the yard. Instead it loves you no matter what, and its focus is to keep Satan out by standing up in force to prevent him from finding an ingress
Community such as this doesn't judge what you've done. They will come fast to your rescue when the squirrels are scratching their way into your attic. When you find that true community in Christ, the comfort of knowing you are a part of it is wonderful.
