Last night I watched a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie called The Mitchell Girl.  It had been widely advertised and hailed as a strong, moving performance in the grand tradition of Hallmark Hall of Fame presentations.  Certainly the acting was strong, but I found myself wanting to shake the main character.  She had been diagnosed with an agressive form of luekemia, decided to make the trip home to be with her family and to deal with an incident from her past that continued to haunt.  She arrived in her hometown and encountered both family and friends, and chose to tell no one.  Her mother is perky, her old boyfriend is still interested in her, she receives word that at long last she has been accepted to medical school and still she chooses to tell no one, take no one into her confidence, let no one into the circle of her misery and fear.

It is only at the end of the movie, of course, that it comes out that she has cancer.  It is only at the end of the movie that she divulges this news not to her mother first, but to the woman across the street whose child she had been babysitting on the night there was a terrible accident resulting in that child's death.  It makes a great movie, but it makes a terrible life scenario.  As a nation, we Americans need to be a little less the "strong, silent" type and a little more willing to open our lives, especially to the people we love and who love us. 

Were there things I kept from my parents?  Sure, I was a child of "the movement" in the 60s and 70s.  I marched on campus.  I smoked and drank and stayed out too late.  But you'd better believe that if I had been diagnosed with a major life-threatening disease, there's one place I would have made a bee-line for:  My parents' house.  I believe in the power not only of family but also of community.

That's what the church is lacking in many places today.  It needs to be the emotional center where one can go to get loved, supported and challenged in the face of life's crises, large and small.  "Come together, people," I wanted to yell at the television last night.  "Come together, people," is not a half bad summation of the message that Jesus gave us----love, compassion, healing, forgiveness.  Can we take each other seriously enough to trust others with our needs and fears as well as our joys and challenges?  Come together.  Right now.