WESLEY ARNING

As a physician, Luke cared for the body, but as an evangelist, he also cared for the soul. From the earliest days, the Christian communities we read about in Acts cared for people’s physical needs: the sick, the widow, and the orphan. They tended to the body just as much as they tended to the soul.

Like beaver dams, churches and the people who fill them are to have a filter quality to them, taking the ash that poisons the water of this world and gracefully settling it to the ground so that pure water may spring forth on the other side. We are safe havens from death and destruction, from nihilism and vain humanism—but we are not simply a fortress that “takes in refugees,” we also “send out.”