Tuesday, May 13, 2008

What to Do?

Click over on the link to Lewbert, my man Lew Ross to read something really sad about downtown communities and schools.

While I am thinking about it, I need to get something off my chest, to confess as it were.

There is a person I deal with, someone who oftentimes drives me up the wall. More than that, this person has the ability to make me feel ashamed that I am human, for surely we are not the same species.

And yet I have a special bond with this person, a love that flows from Christ and draws me in, making me both approach and now confess to this ambivalence. This person taxes not only my patience but my perspective. And yet at the same time, this person validates my approach to ministry, to throwing down boundaries and letting people in you would not let in unless God had compelled you to do so.

I sense this person’s desperation, a long history of events genetic and historic. I sense that the world steamrolls my friend on a regular basis, that it moves too fast, that our society demands too much, and this person will spend a lot of time circling the drain, living that inevitability masked in carelessness.

It is this foolishness, this carelessness, this ignorance that wears me down and makes me love. I am wondering what the Lord is up to with placing this desire, nearly a vision to call this person to my home, to my life, to say that my house is a home. Wherever my house is and whenever my house is, it is a home for my difficult friend.

It’s a bit like the frustration Lew is expressing; so many people need a father, a new family.

Some lines from a RUSH song (“The Larger Bowl”) float in my head in these times:

If we’re so much the same like I always hear

Why such different fortunes and fame?...

Some are blessed, some are cursed,

The golden child or scarred from birth

While others only see the worst

Such a lot of pain on the earth

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