Turning Toward Someone We’d Rather Just Ignore
LETTER BY GRACE POUCH
My mom is fond of telling this story.
We were at the grocery store. I was 3 years old — at that brief stage of childhood where the ability to parrot cute things overlaps with unquestioning and joyful compliance. The result: adorable command performances.
Always friendly, Mom decided I could help her spread a little cheer in Bi-Lo. (Toddlers, like puppies, are excellent conversation starters.) So, from my shopping cart perch, I was commissioned to smile at shoppers and say with gusto, “Happy Easter!”
The plan went perfectly. Smiles came from the faces of graying grandmas and young clerks. Even lunch-breaking businesspeople forgot for a moment they were in a hurry.
We took our place in the checkout line. Mom faced forward, and I, in the cart, faced backward.
“Mommy, tell him ‘Happy Easter,’” I burst out, pointing behind her.
She made herself turn to meet the glazed stare of an unkempt man. She’d caught a glimpse of him earlier but offered him no greeting and didn’t prompt me to offer one either. He reeked of cigarettes and body odor. His basket held a bottle of malt liquor, nothing else.
She mustered up a smile and a “Happy Easter.”
“Happy Easter,” he slurred back.
Mom tells this story with compunction. She took it as a word from God “out of the mouths of babes” — a call to love the least and to expand her expectancy for Easter to break into unexpected places with undeserving people (who, beneath appearances, is all of us).
On this week’s Life With God podcast episode, John Paul Westin talks with Nathan about being called from church pastoring to prison chaplaincy.
He sensed God asking him, John Paul, do you want to see what I am doing in here?
John Paul’s physical eyesight has been declining for years. But in the penitentiary, among men who have done very bad things, the eyes of his heart are opened. “The Lord has shown me things that he loves about these people…. to see why he would find them special.”
If we want to see what God’s up to, we have to turn to the one we’d rather just ignore, look them in the eyes, and speak whatever “Happy Easter” they need to hear — an offer of friendship, an assurance of God’s love, a word of forgiveness. We shouldn’t be surprised if we find the eyes of Jesus looking back.
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
P.S. Drop-In Listening Groups are a great way to experience the Fellowship of the Burning Heart format where you listen, share, practice silence, and pray in a safe space. We have meeting times scheduled through August. Register free here.
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
On the Life with God podcast, Nathan speaks with prison chaplain John Paul Westin about the penitentiary as his parish and learning to see inmates as God’s “friends and special ones.”
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2.
Do you see this woman? Drawing on Luke’s Gospel, Chris Webb explains how the compassionate life — for Jesus and for us — is grounded in “genuine, direct relationships, not nebulous issues.” Read “Learning to See.”
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3.
Brother Andrew, the famous Dutch Bible smuggler and evangelist to extremists in Gaza, Israel, and Pakistan, wrote, “As long as we see any person — Muslim, Communist, terrorist — as an enemy, then the love of God cannot flow through us to reach him.” Christianity Today looks back at his challenging witness.
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4.
Generosity is “an act of defiance against our cultural landscape that pulses with messages of scarcity.” Lacy Borgo shares personally and profoundly about the cost of compassion in her essay “Unlimited Liability.”
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5.
In his essay “Saving Friends: What I’ve Learned from Insufferable Patients,” Dr. Brewer Eberly writes, “This epidemic [of loneliness] demands renewed attention to how, and whom, we befriend… The very idea of the hospital, after all, is born of the call toward hospital-ity and love of the poor and the stranger.”
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There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. The beautiful film Of Gods and Men tells the true story of monks living in Algeria who must decide when civil war comes whether to stay with their Muslim neighbors who have become dear friends or leave them in order to escape the Islamic extremists.
WORTH QUOTING
The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment…In him, whoever he be, lies, hidden or revealed, a beautiful brother. Thus will love spread and spread in wider and stronger pulses till the whole human race will be to the man sacredly lovely. Drink-debased, vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-bollen, vanity-smeared, they will yet be brothers, yet be sisters, yet be God-born neighbors.
– George MacDonald
Unspoken Sermons, Series I, 1867
TO CONTEMPLATE
The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix)
1890
(source)
Painted by Van Gogh after a mental breakdown, while he was in the hospital in St-Rémy.
TO PONDER
Considering praying this simple request: God, open my eyes this week to someone I might overlook and help me to turn toward and bless them.