We inherited some high tension power lines when we bought our house and land. They run through the field behind the house. The field is ours but the power lines aren’t. My electrician friend works for TVA so he let me know that the two shorter towers are Memphis LGW’s and the third is his…not his, TVA’s. I can do whatever I want with MY field but if anything I do interferes with their lines and services, they can come in and remove the problem if you know what I mean.
Anytime we invite someone over for the first time, the first thing they say when they walk in the backyard is “woah!” The pool and landscaping are beautiful(in my opinion!) but the towers are huge monsters staring down you down.
Then, we usually get some variation of the questions below: 
“What are those?”
“Will those give you cancer?”
“What happens if you touch them?”
“Is that your land?”
“How close can you get to them without getting shocked?”
…..and more.
My TVA buddy tried to explain all about them but it was too complicated for me to remember. He’s an electrician and smart. I’m not an electrician and not very smart.
I knew nothing about power lines prior to moving into our house but now I know a lot of little facts. But, there’s only one fact that really matters: there’s enough power going through those big, fat lines to kill you before you know it. Enough power that at night, you can hear it humming. Enough power that if you stand under them with a long florescent bulb in your hand, it will light up without touching any part of the hardware. I have no desire to touch or try to get close to those wires. When I mow the field, I stay a good distance away from the tower base even though the power is in the lines not the tower itself. I don’t need to be an electrician to figure out anything else about those lines. They are nothing to play around with and must be taken seriously.
If you were somehow able to receive a shock from their power and walk away, it would be a miracle. There’s a pretty good chance whatever you did to facilitate the shock would been seen as extremely stupid. “Why did you think you could…..?” For example after buying the house I cleared out some brush and took it to the back of my field to dump it. I was standing on a trailer full of brush and trees limbs throwing them in a pile. I picked up a limb about seven feet long, swung it over my head to throw it in the pile. Even though the lines are roughly fifty feet overhead, the static shock was enough to make me drop the limb. My friend at TVA said “yep, that’s what’ll happen.” Since I’ve been in my home, I realize that the towers and lines don’t scare me anymore but the electricity does. It demands respect.
I’m telling you all this to make a simple analogy with the church. The church building, I should say, is the tower. It doesn’t do anything but give power a place to accumulate and be dispersed. It occurred to me that this is how any church building should be seen by the world around it.
I think the analogy could go further into the details of the church but since I’m lazy, I’m not going to list the ones I see. There are a bunch. Jesus used parables to help the disciples understand Kingdom ideas. He paralleled their kingdom with His to help them get the idea but he didn’t just spell it out. So read the verse below and then just think about it. It has been a good, living parable to help me evaluate how I DO church.
Romans 8:11 “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus[a] from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
After I Think About It... 