Imagine if you will a human body with parts that don’t get along. The left foot is jealous of the hands. “I am tired of being shoved into a shoe and having to be the one to hit the pavement every day. I want to be a hand.”

“What are you griping about?” asks the right foot. “I have to do everything you do, plus put up with your stinky smell all day.”

“You both stink” says the nose. “And I’m tired of the joke about the nose running and the feet smelling. I don’t want to be part of a body anymore.”

“It’s no picnic being right below you,” says the mouth. “When you start running, guess who gets dripped on. Those hands are always so slow with the tissues. I want to move. Up here on the face, we have to face everything! I want to be where the belly button is. He gets to be covered up by the shirt whenever we go out. That’s where I want to be. Who designed this body, anyway?”

The ears had a bit of an inferiority complex. They got teased by all the other parts. They got depressed because they could hear the mockery but couldn’t answer. They just wanted to leave the body and live alone.

“Don’t you wish you were an eye like me?” The eyes bragged. “Everyone says that I am beautiful. I could live on my own and my whole body would just be an eye.  I don’t need any of you!”

Does this dialogue sound ludicrous? It is my paraphrase of a Scripture passage, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. The passage is too lengthy to quote here, so I recommend you to read it for yourself. Basically, the apostle Paul uses the human body as an analogy of the church, which is the Body of Christ. I don’t mean the church buildings; the church refers to the people who meet there to worship together.

The universal church is made up of all Christians on our planet (and on any other planet that God may have chosen to populate). It includes those who are living and those who have died as well as those who have yet to be born. All of the people who have made a decision to follow Christ, to the best of the knowledge that God has revealed to them, make up the universal church. These are the people that will be spending eternity with Christ in Heaven.