What happens when the church stands up? I’m not going to say what would happen. There are lots of people who are willing to, and I suppose if I hung out with them, I might be more inclined to seeing their point of view. But I’m placing my confidence in God’s Spirit, that He completes what he begins, that He is never idle, and that He is always the victor.
I’ve been harping the last several weeks about the intersection of the Church at worship and the Church serving the world. As if they were two separate things, that coincided from time to time, like asteroids. As though you could love God without really loving your neighbor. Or as if you could truly love your neighbor without being touched by God’s Spirit.
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It’s consumed me this past year. I’ve been a little dry maybe, and needing to be relivened. I’ve met so many people who are so jaded, so skeptical- so smart that they simply can’t understand why a person would subject their minds, subject their lives to a book. The Church, to them, is a corrupted, religio-political means to subject people under a power. Faith is a lie for me to tell myself when I feel blue- when the weight of my life is more than I can bear. It’s absolution and a salve for a conscience burdened by guilt. It’s a blind eye turned towards death, war, and the worst possible living conditions.
So how did it become this big? How did it grow from a homeless rabble and 12 men that were otherwise used up, washed out do-overs, to a world-wide social standard, familiar in all corners of the world? Without the internet?
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Somehow, this one man, who probably didn’t travel more than 100 miles from his own home (excluding a sojourn in Egypt as a small child) managed to become the focal point for billions of lives. How? Great speaker? Perhaps. Great networker? Weeeeelllll, not really. He didn’t hang with the power-brokers, or journalists. And when he did he usually ripped them six ways. So, I don’t see the cover of US weekly touting him in any kind of positive way. They’d have photos of his “worst fashion moments” and how he really looked in a 2-piece. There would probably be reports from unnamed sources of illicit encounters, midnight deals with God knows who. This guy was no Oprah Winfrey. He wasn’t even Mickey Rooney. He maybe was more like Simon Cowell. Everybody hates him, but he’s ALWAYS right. I don’t know, maybe I went too far with that.
But somehow this guy affected world change! Without major media, without any kind of material trust fund. Mostly by loving the people he talked with everyday. Somehow, by loving the people around him everyday, those people were infected with somekind of insane “pay it forward” mentality that was so unstoppable that an entire region of the world was impacted within one lifetime. Within a mere 3 or 4 generations! People a thousand miles away or more were changing the entire paths of their lives based on the touch of a man’s affection, genuine love, and grace-filled manner.
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Last week, a small group of people shared that touch. You could tell that the lives in that group had been reoriented. There were about 300 people there. They gave 1684 dollars, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much food. Well, I could begin. I filled up the back of my 1987 Chevy Suburban. It took 2 men about 20 minutes to load it all in. And that was mostly grocery bags or small boxes. It’s not like we stacked it one can at a time. It took two flat carts to get it to the food pantry. I think stuff like that could make a person’s life different. I can see how stuff like that could cause a person to re-examine their life. It would be understandable for a person to receive a gift like this, for them to ask “Why have you done this? What motivates this sort of compassion?”
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I have an answer. And it has almost nothing to do with me, or who I am, or who I want to be. It has to do with what I deserved. And what I received. And how they just don’t match up. And how amazing that is. How unforgettably amazing.
