My wife and I were sitting with our friend Josh near the indoor playground at the Opry Mills Mall in Nashville. We were fed up with shopping and didn't like the movie choices, so we had sat ourselves down to get a game plan for the next few hours. Instead, we found ourselves watching the children crawling around inside the play structure (I am always sad that I don't meet the height requirements for those places). Little kids are fun to watch. They're so unaware of anything but what interests them. We'd smile and watch little Tommy nearly get trampled by mall traffic as he charted a straight path from the playground to his parents, all sweaty and thirsty, asking Mom or Dad for a drink. Kids are fun to watch.
But teens and grown-ups are more fun. There were wannabe gangsters leaning against the wall acting tough, all dressed up like P-Diddy with their pants twelve sizes too big riding down around their knees and their bright white, brand new sneaks, jerseys and balls caps with the bills ironed flat. There were guys and girls in long, black trench coats wearing black death metal t-shirts, black jeans, black army boots and black fingernail polish. Their hair was dyed black to match, too. There were underage girls walking around in next to nothing like they'd forgotten to finish dressing after they put their underwear on that morning. My father in-law, who is an avid fisherman, would say they came to the mall to do some trolling. It was funny to watch as the girls would get mad and wonder why all the guys at the mall checked them out and treated them disrespectfully. There were the soccer moms who had probably parked on top of a few compact cars with their Hummers out in the parking lot. There were old farmers gazing around at the enormous mall, recollecting the houses and pastures that used to be there. We saw skaters and jocks, rednecks and yuppies, preppies and geeks. Everyone had their look, their identity. Everyone did their best to make sure everyone else knew who they were. The more people I observe, the more convinced I am that life isn't so much about the level of confidence with which we carry ourselves, but about how good we can get at hiding our insecurities. It seems as though we are more intent on covering the bad and uncomfortable in our lives than exposing and exercising the good.
But our eyes would always return to the man in his clashing denim outfit as he milled around outside the theater area of the mall. Occasionally he would walk up to a group of people, cross his arms standing uncomfortably close, and listen to their conversations as if he were a part of them. And we all wondered what the parents were thinking as he walked around the playground structures, poking his head into the portholes and peering through the clear Plexiglas domes.
At one point, he meandered up to a group standing very close to us. With this closer viewpoint, we could better see his long, yellowed fingernails and his wispy, uneven facial hair. He had what Josh called crooked "English teeth."
Finally, Josh wondered aloud if the gathering crowd of twenty-somethings was a church group. I agreed, but took it one step further and guessed that our subject was also a part of the group. "It would only make sense," I said. "That would explain why no one paid any attention to him when he walked up to their circle of friends. If he weren't part of my group and came walking up like that, I'd at least acknowledge the strange guy invading my personal space. But they didn't even look at him!"
My observation let on to my cynicism and disgust with the general sense of apathy pervading the church today, and it opened up a discussion about selfishness, exclusivity and the various other shortcomings of God's people. While we complained, I kept an eye on the man, keeping in mind our hypothesis about him and his group. My heart hurt for him. Any child on the playground could have made the observation that he was dying to belong, be loved. His body language screamed it. But his own peers, if in fact he had come to the mall with them, ignored him. I decided I would talk to him. Whether he was with another group or not, I had recognized a need, and it became as much my responsibility to act as it was his group's.
The next time he walked by, I called out to him. "Hey dude!" Maybe he had learned long ago that those kind of greetings weren't meant for the likes of him. Maybe he just didn't hear me. Either way, I wasn't going to give up so easily. On his next pass, I called out louder. "HEY DUDE!" He turned and looked at me, then looked around to see if I might be talking to someone else. But my eyes were on him. I waved him over and he came and stood in front of us.
"Hey, sorry to bother you. I was just wondering, are you here at the mall with a church group?"
"Oh, yeah. We're a thingles gwoup with the Church of Jesus Chwist of Latter Day Thaints." He had an odd combination of an inconsistent French accent mixed with a speech impediment. His lisp was wonderful. I've always wanted to start a band and name it Lithp, but I am too afraid that it might offend people like him.
"Latter Day Saints. That's the Mormon church, right?" I asked. I knew it was.
"Yeth, a man named Jotheph Thmith, who was a pwophet of God, started it when he was appwoached by angels who told him the location of some hidden tablets with more of God's words on them." He knew the story well. We asked him his name and continued talking to him for close to 20 minutes, making small talk about his Irish genealogy and his hopes of someday becoming a model in L.A., but mainly talking about his church and beliefs. Evan (that was his name) had been befriended by a Mormon elder and had found a place in the singles ministry at a local Church of Latter Day Saints. He was easily drawn in to the church and believed their doctrine as truth mainly because of the acceptance he found within that congregation. At the end of our conversation, we told Evan it was great meeting him and he quickly turned and walked away.
I don't believe Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, nor do I accept the Book of Mormon as an authoritative word of God. But Mormons believe in the Bible too, as do I. And the Bible's central theme cries out from its pages, spotlighting the unconditional love of an Almighty God who created humans in his own image and desires to have a relationship with them. As his people, we are called to forgive as he forgives (Colossians 3:13), sacrifice as he sacrificed (Matthew 10: 38,39; Romans 12:1; 1 Peter 2:4,5,21), and love as he loves (1 John 4:11). Evan told us he attended the church and believed as they did solely because of the acceptance he found in its singles ministry. But we had observed the cold shoulders and complete lack of engagement from his "friends," and were left wanting for evidence of true love. I have come to believe that Evan was hanging on to a distant relative of love, but perhaps the closest he had yet come to real love. He may have been experiencing a sort of patronizing tolerance or politeness, but love? I was not convinced of that.
In The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases 1 John 3:16,17 this way: "This is how we've come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God's love? It disappears. And you made it disappear."
Other translations of the same passage call it "laying down our lives for our brothers." In Evan's case, no one was willing to lay down 5 minutes of their time for him. Every school, every workplace, and sadly, every church has an Evan. We all know the guy or girl who has a little more trouble fitting in than the rest of us, but what are we doing about them? Do we stand back and talk about how bad we feel for them or do we take steps to actually show them love? Its a little disheartening that we would so easily recognize a church group not for the love that it showed, but instead failed to show. It wasn't even a case of oversight, but a blatant disregard for the needs of another, and it came from a body of people who claim to follow Christ, the one who took his love all the way to death for us. His was the real love that 1 John 3:18 speaks of; that doesn't merely talk about love, but practices it.
Church, we are failing. I am not merely talking about organizations of people who come together every Sunday to carry out a well planned program. I am talking about you and I am talking about me. We are the gears and wheels of a big rusting machine that sits collecting dust in a fancy garage. As the individual molecules that form a bigger Body, I picture us to be most like a T-Rex, with our huge, loud, dangerous, incisored mouth and tiny little arms that barely reach far enough to do any good. I have seen pastors try to rally their congregations around activities geared toward helping those in need, only to watch them fail due to lack of interest or attendance. Indeed, I have been that pastor.
James says that faith without works is dead. I understand that to mean that unless we take an active role in the lives of others, our faith is useless. I am not talking about dropping a few bucks in the plate on Sunday morning. Nor am I am talking about waiting for the church to organize a food drive for the local homeless shelter. What I am talking about is personal action. Individual, voluntary, do-it-by-yourself-if-you-have-to action. In his book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller, one of my favorite authors, writes about his participation in protests in Portland. He carried signs and chanted with the crowds as the president arrived to deliver a speech in the city. Afterward, Don felt ashamed because he realized that he wasn't doing anything other than actively disagreeing with someone else's actions. Waving signs about poverty and world hunger wasn't making the homeless people in his city any better off. So he began to do something about it. He began to respond directly to the needs of those around him. Our faith comes alive when we put down our picket signs, get off our soap boxes and reach out our hands to help someone else.
For years, I have relied on my pastor and the church body to complete my identity as a believer. For years, I have been wrong in that attitude. My identity as a believer is found in Christ alone, and the validation of that identity is found in my purposed responses to his presence in my life. Think about a simple word we use every day: Christian. As soon as I attach the suffix "-ian" to Christ's name, it becomes a label with responsibility attached. Now I belong to Christ, for I have been bought at a high price. I am responsible to follow him. Now I resemble Christ and my life should characterize his. That is why I spoke to Evan that day. Two thousand years ago, it would have been easier for Christ to ignore the deep spiritual need I would have for forgiveness. It would have been easier for me to ignore the need I saw in Evan that day but I have been in his position, desperate for real love, and I have fallen prey to the false loves this world has to offer. I didn't expect to change his whole world. I only wanted to show him love. I was taking an interest in his life and what he had to say.
Some Christians, in an attempt to make excuses for their own shortcomings, would say that Evan is "hard to love," and leave it at that. I hate the terms "unlovable" or "hard to love." They say more about the person using them - about their unwillingness to really love, in the truest sense of the word - than they do about the person they are meant to describe. Evan is not unlovable. He was created to love and be loved. It is not hard to love Evan. It is hard to love, period. It is hard because we are often so consumed by our own needs and wants that we spend our time, in a sense, like a Doberman chasing its own tail. Dobermans, for one thing, do not even have tails, so there is nothing to catch. They will just run in circles until they either give up or fall over, dizzy from trying. From a human's perspective, the dog looks foolish. I've seen it happen, though, and I could clearly see that he'd never catch what wasn't there. We laugh at the dog, but I think God must cringe as he watches us do the same thing. Our hearts lead us to believe in a fantastical idea of happiness. We are hoping to find complete peace and contentment in the acquisition of money, power, and popularity - but such a place does not exist because contentment comes when we are happy with what we already have, not what we hope to have. So we continue to run in that circle, never catching up to what we want, until the day comes when we die, tired and dizzy. Instead of fame and wealth, I believe giving our very lives to others in the name of Jesus is the key to the peace and contentment we seek. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."
All I know is that the church...no, I am failing when it comes to loving people. I know I have failed when I look back on a situation and see there was more that I could have done. Hindsight is always 20/20. It happens too much in my life. I could have asked for Evan's phone number and asked him to have coffee sometime (that would have been a big sacrifice for me since I hate coffee). I could have walked around the mall with him. There was more I could have done. But I didn't, because even in my attempts to show him love, I had reservations. I still held back in the midst of what I considered a selfless act (oh, the depths of my piety!). Why do we do that? I think I have an idea why, though I can offer no easy solution. I think we keep our love on reserve because we are creatures of habit, and the tail we long to chase is constantly wagging in our subconscious, whispering the question, What does this person have to offer me? If there is evidence that a relationship with them could prove profitable, we invest. If not, then we politely fade them out of the picture. I have become aware of this attitude in my life and have been taking steps to knock it out. Lately, I have been driving into Nashville to the grocery store near downtown. I buy bread, bologna, cheese, mustard, mayo, fruit, crackers, granola bars and drink boxes and make sack lunches to hand out to homeless men and women. Once, my friend Byron went with me and he bought onions, lettuce and tomatoes along with all the other stuff I bought. He said we should do for others what we would want them to do to for us, and that he would never make a bologna sandwich without tomatoes and lettuce. Carol goes downtown with me when she can, so does Josh. We have made relationships with several men, learning their names and doing our best to love them like Christ would. Sometimes we bring hats, gloves, coats and warm shirts to hand out with the lunches. Its amazing how much I have learned from them and, without knowing it, how much they have given me. But what I gain from them is nothing like that make-believe tail I tend to chase. Its much less dizzying, much more fulfilling.
My friend Jason told me that if we would stop looking at the green grass on the other side of the fence and just make the grass greener on our side, life would be better. So for now, I'm doing my best to grow it thick and green right where I am. After all, I don't want God's love to disappear because I am busy nursing my agenda. And I don't want Evan to be lonely anymore.