Because stained glass is always a determining factor towards historical truth and evidence. Here’s Jesus wearing a pair of Chacos. What Would Jesus Do? Wear Chacos - that’s what.
I hike in them (twice this week) and wear them everywhere else. They’re the best thing for feet since toenails. Jesus wore them and so should you…
Often times, as Christians, we get this mentality that it’s our job to fix people. That mentality is fueled by two ideas: 1) that we can see a person’s life objectively and 2) that we can judge sin. Most time we don’t process it this way, but if we were to dissect our motives – then we’d know it to be true. But never once in scriptures are we called to fix people. Share the Good News? Yes. Show love and compassion? Yep. Fix people? Not once. If this is true then why we defaultly fall back on lecturing and preaching at people. It doesn’t work, so why do we do it?
What am I getting at? Well, in my latest clash with Pharisees, one of our students was being shackled by judgment – a harsh hand for something they did. Were they wrong? Sure. Do they know it? Yes. And in watching two people react to this student my eyes were really opened. One adult decided to lecture the young man pointing out the many ways his life has gone wrong. They wanted to convince him of their own rightness. This adult had not earned the right to speak into this student’s life.
The second person approached the young man very differently. This adult had been journeying with the student for quite some time. The first adult had not. The second adult had a conversation with the student; not lecturing or shaming them, but pursuing their heart. Through their conversation life change happened. The lecture just resulted in hardness of heart.
If journeying with a person works. If Christ’s example says that journey is the way… then why do we do it any other way? So many times we use the Bible or tradition or our own self-righteousness to separate us from others. It is used to fuel this air of judgmentalism (‘you’re sinful and I’m not’) which births this lecturing mentality. This way keeps us clean. It keeps us pious. And it keeps our hands from getting dirty. We ultimately remain in control.
To journey with people, we simply walk humbly with the Lord and invest our lives into others. With journey we are forced to be on God’s time table. It takes time and we have no control over situations or people that we encounter. Journey facilitates openness, authenticity, fragility, brokenness and a deeper love that we can experience alone. The lecture keeps an ‘us and them’ mentality that will always keeps us apart and we were never meant to be apart.
If we don’t journey with others in Christ, living loving, investing, then Gospel you live out is no longer the good news to those around you. It becomes a wall when it was meant to be an open hand. An open hand reaches out to others. An open hand accepts help. An open hand joins with someone else’s hand because the gospel was mean to be that way.
A fool lectures thinking they have it all figured out. A wise man knows he isn’t wise and has compassion for the one who has stumbled knowing they have stumbled too. Life is a journey that is out of our hands, out of our control, and beyond our understanding. So let us journey together, humbly together reaching out to the one who is in control and wants to journey with us.
We can tell people the right answers, but if we are unwilling to journey with them our words are meaningless… and so are our intentions.
I was the speaker at a middle school camp all last week. It’s a pretty sweet gig because my family gets to tag along. During one of the days we had some time and took the kids to a beach near Tacoma. While the kids hunted for crabs, Miriam and I spent the afternoon searching for sea glass. As we were collecting it, I felt I needed to use it during my message that evening. The message was about the sinful woman (Luke 7: 36-50) who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and breaks open a bottle of perfume to anoint his feet. It was a message calling for these students to lay their own brokenness, wounds, and pain at the Lord’s feet.
As I was talking that night, I brought out the glass and began to form it into the shape of the cross on the ground. Then, what happened next was all of the Lords doing. I offered an opportunity for the students to come up and to simply kneel at the broken cross, offering their own brokenness to the Lord. It was quiet for a moment, then something in the room broke open. Not something out loud, it was something breaking within the hearts many of these students. Tears began to come.
I’ve been through emotional services before, but this was something completely different. It was a real, raw, painful hurt that just came gushing out. I’ve never been around something so filled with agony and yet so healing at the same time. The The Lord made his presence known and touched many of those students that night. When you open yourself up to the Lord and experience Him you always walk away changed.
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