Busy Lives and Folded Arms

One night I was playing basketball up at the YMCA and met a guy who used to be in ministry. He actually was a youth minister before he got burned by his church, but now he is a social worker in the heart of Atlanta.

After we had finished playing we got to talking about his history with the church and his current work. He had actually spent time working with a seminary and doing guest lectures.

He told me that one time he brought a homeless friend and posted him outside of the classroom, and then divided his class into two seperate roomes. So you have two classrooms next to each other, both full of seminary students, and a homeless man sitting on the wall between the rooms.

Before he split the class he gave them instructions. They would work together on writing a sermon on the Good Samaritan. He gave each group a certain amount of time to create the sermon and told them that it should be easy because this story was so well known. After the allotted time was up, each class was to send half of their group to the other group where they would compare each other’s sermons.

This might be a little confusing, so let’s say there were 20 people to start with. 10 people went to one classroom, and 10 went to the other. Once each group finished the sermon 5 from the first room went to the second room, and 5 from the second room went to the first room.

As the time wound down each group hurried to put the final touches on their masterpiece. When the time was up they hurried to the other classroom to preach a message that would capture the historical value of the parable, but at the same time bring relevant application to this day and age.

They basically told the story from the Bible and then plugged in modern day figures to capture the weight of what was going on. You could have a Baptist preacher passing a man with a blowout in the side of the road hurrying to get to church, and then the head deacon doing the same thing, but the person who stops to help is a gay man who happens to also be the town atheist, but he is the one who shows compassion.

After each group presented their sermon they pulled the class back together in the first room and the teacher (the man I played basketball with) gave his take on the story… except instead of plugging in a pastor or head deacon passing someone with a blowout, he plugged in seminary students passing a homeless man in need to preach their sermons to one another. Wow! Can you imagine the weight of the story sinking down on the seminary students as his homeless friend stepped foot in the classroom?

Where is our heart for the needy? Where is our heart for the homeless, the sick, the diseased, the widows, the orphans, and the lost?

Here’s where I am struggling… it is easy to put some money in a love offering for a benevolence offering, it’s easy to go down town and buy some homeless guys a meal, or even give them some spare change to keep them from following you, it’s easy to help out at a soup kitchen twice a year… but what about really investing in their lives?

I recently had a crazy encounter with a transvestite (that’s another story), but it led me to go downtown and hangout with some homeless people. I got a lot of people asking me for money, some being very honest about wanting marijuana, and others just wanting a bottle of water, then everything in between; but the crazy thing is just about all of them either initiated or asked to be hugged. This really messed my heart up… what a simple and easy thing to provide… but what a great need… a need to feel cared about.

A week after hanging with the homeless a homeless teenager showed up at the door of my church. We had just finished up our early service, I was heading to teach Sunday School, and someone pulled me aside and said that someone needed to help this guy.

The temptation was to pass him off to someone else… because, hey, I’ve got to go teach; but at the instant I was reminded of the Good Samaritan and the story of the seminary students.

I talked to him for a second and could tell he was strung out on something… which I later found out that he was strung out on something and hung over. I could tell that people were uncomfortable around him… and to be honest, he was very uncomfortable to be around. He was making a lot of fidgety movements, and he kept opening his eyes extremely wide and moving his neck out like a turtle (hard to explain).

I decided that I didn’t care what people would think, and I took him to the college and career Sunday School class. I told him that if he hung out there they could instruct him how to get to the service afterwards, and if he came to the service that I would take him out for lunch.

We went to lunch and I found out a lot about his life story… man, so many of us have it so easy… and the whole time we were talking I had thoughts going through my head… “Should I let him crash at my house? Will he steal any of my stuff? What if he goes crazy and kills my dog? Should I get him a hotel room? Should I try to contact his mom or sister and let them know where he is? Do they honestly not care about him?”

After a good while of talking I led into the gospel. I wanted to make sure that even if he didn’t feel loved by those around him that he could have true and complete love from God. He wasn’t like most homeless guys I’ve met that know all the answers already, and tell you that they’re covered by the blood… he was clueless to the gospel and told me that he was an atheist until that morning, and now he didn’t know what to think.

We eventually parted ways, but sure enough the next morning he showed up to our church again wanting to see me. He asked if he could fix stuff around the church, but we have a protocol for that, and plus I couldn’t leave someone I didn’t really know unsupervised, and I was too busy catching up on work to babysit him. I told him that he should use the time he had to walk around town and try to find a job, but he didn’t want to walk in the heat. I felt bad, but I ended up telling him that there was nothing I could do for him at that moment, and I encouraged him one last time to go try to find a job and he ended up leaving the church visibly frustrated at us.

What do we do with this? How do we help people? Can we truly help from afar, or are we going to have to get our hands dirty and truly love these people who are hard to love? What did Christ model for us? Are we easy for God to love?

The answers seem so clear cut and easy… but it’s not easy… it’s really hard to come through when you’re face to face with the situation. I’ve said it before, but I think Solomon hit the nail on the head. The temptation is to busy ourselves with work and other things to the point where we don’t think about the needy, or we just fold our arms and act as if the task is too big to actually put a dent in what needs to be accomplished… either way, we end up doing nothing.

I don’t know how this will all unfold in my life. I wish I could say that I am selling all I have and going to live homeless and give every paycheck to helping the needy, but that seems far from my heart right now. Sure, it has this almost radical romantic appeal to it, but the reality of that coming to fruition seems so far off.

Maybe I’ll never see the guy again, or maybe he will show up again tonight or tomorrow or in a few days… but whether I see him again or not doesn’t matter because we’ll always have the poor and needy, and I will be faced with a very similar situation sooner than later, and when I do, how will I handle it?

Pray for the needy. Pray for my heart. Pray for First Baptist and how we can help. Pray for the universal church and how WE can help. Pray that we would model the life Christ modeled for us, and that we wouldn’t harden our hearts towards obedience. When you pray “Thy Kingdom come,” don’t let it be vain repetition, but search your heart and seek out ways that you can bring what you are praying for into part.

I fear the day when I stand side by side with the once lame and needy and know that I did nothing.