What an incredible and powerful text like so many of the magnificent words of the Bible are read so easily the first time and as each word is re-visited and prayed upon the magnitude of the message intensifies and the call of our Lord simply trumpets out and convicts us of this life we live. What is it that I have done in my life with all of my heart, purely focused on the Lord, simply for the inheritance of the Lord as a reward. What a call, what a claim, what majesty it is to recall those occasions in which the heart was pure, actions innocent, and our spirit was so focused on the pleasure of the Lord.
“When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question was being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation.” (Gilead). We live a life, not matter how we jest that we hate people, in which daily we are confronted with people. In would be lovely to actually be in the presence of people that we admire, that we wish to know better, that we love, but we are face to face daily with strangers, eyes we have never met not may never meet again and the expectation is the same, that we must love. The entire work of our lives is based on the relationships that we have with people and how we present the love we have for God in the work and actions we provide to every man.
I just erased two pages of the worst, contrived, meaningless language I could possibly write trying to be something outside of this passage. The fact is there have been very few times in my life in which I can honestly say I lived within the bounds of this verse and sadly I have felt the judgement of the proceeding verse each and every time, “Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favortism.” Col. 3:25
I must begin by mentioning my time in Dallas. I was going to school, living with Dr. Thom and the Meigs’ family and really trying to live a “Christian” life. Early in my time in Dallas and at Park Cities Baptist I was privileged enough to meet a man named Rip Parker. Rip was around 65 years old at the time, drove a beat up pickup truck, wore tattered jeans, had glaucoma in one of his eyes and treated every single human being like I imagine I will be treated in heaven one day. He simply looked into your eyes, smiled, wrapped his hand around your arm and a spirit inside of him asked you to be part of his world.
His world was one I had never seen. Five years before I had met Rip, he drove a Mercedes 560 and was driving to a meeting in downtown Dallas one morning, took a wrong turn, or maybe two, and ended up in a certain part of the city that had a little more culture than $500 dollar opera tickets could provide. He was bewildered at what he encountered as he saw numerous homeless men sleeping on the sidewalk and simply pulled his car over and could not move. He simply said he was paralyzed with shame. He never made it to his meeting in a five star hotel three blocks away, and the next day he sold his Mercedes, bought a pickup truck, went to a Costco and filled the truck with food and went back to the same place he had gotten lost at and began to feed the homeless. He had done it every day since, for five consecutive years when I met him for the first time and I was a believer.
Chris and I went with Rip to feed the homeless after church one Sunday a few weeks later and were amongst dozens of other volunteers who simply did it as an activity once a month, or year, as a means to “live” their faith a little bit. That first Sunday we had about 15 twenty something singles with us, the majority of us dapper in Polo’s or other high end outfits trying to maintain an appearance for the opposite sex and group of 20 or 25 high school students that wanted nothing more to leave the presence of the squalor before one of their friends not in church saw them. That day changed my life.
I remember Rip sharing the stories of some of the men we were about to serve and warning us about drugs and alcohol and disbelief. He would laugh and just confirm these homeless men were all just little boys who never grew up and would talk about how they didn’t even need the food we were offering, but simply needed conversation and candy, the candy to satiate their craving for drugs for a bit.
An hour into our day, there was a man sitting against a wall, a brick wall in the shade of Dallas, with a New York Yankees hat pulled low against the top of his nose. He simply rocked and he had a book gripped between his hands and I for some reason sat beside him and asked what book he had. It was a copy of Civil Disobedience by Emerson, one of my favorite all time books, that I was about to be educated upon. I mentioned that I had read the book, and he began to orate the book to me. He had memorized the entire book and when I asked him about his passion he spoke of how he was a philosophy professor and simply could not live in the world he taught about and for the past twenty years had chosen to live the life he believed in his heart to live. He had a wife, and a son he had left and had been to nearly major every city in the United States and travelled by squatting on trains to different towns in every season. He smiled the entire time he spoke with me and truly enjoyed the life he lived and did not regret a single aspect of any day.
I was captured by his story, his eyes and so many other aspects of those streets that I quickly became a regular with Rip and after a few months I was with Rip four or five days a week. I never handed out food. That was never my intention and that is not what I offered these men and it certainly was not what they offered me. In every face, behind every story, hidden behind the coats, the lies, the liquor, the guilt and the drugs, I saw myself and I simply tried to give people a few moments of grace hoping that I may be pardoned or forgiven my life, or that the guilt and pain would simply go away. It never did.
I received one of the greatest gifts of my life during that year of ministry. I had a class run late and I did not have time to change before I left so I hurried downtown and caught up with Rip at the second of the seven stops. There are no manners amongst the homeless so when I arrived, I quickly changed clothes and threw my clothes in the trunk of the car. I had also brought some clothes that had been donated and somewhere along our trip that day I had opened the trunk of the car, simply not remembering my clothes were also in the trunk and those men grabbed what they wished. Sadly for me, my wallet was in the pants I was wearing and by the final stop I realized my clothes and wallet were gone and my face must of shown my disappointment as Rip inquired to what was wrong. I told him my wallet was missing and he cursed those men something fierce.
Two days later at the same stop, a man walked up to me and he was crying. He was particularly dirty, even for the homeless, but he came up to me finding it very difficult to talk and apologized for the men and me losing my wallet and reached into his coat and pulled out a wallet, not mine, but a ripped and tattered, beaten brown leather wallet and he handed it to me and implored me to have it. It had 2 dollars and seventeen cents in it and he just said, “please do not be angry, we want you here,” and as quickly as he said it he turned and walked away. I stood in the burn of the Dallas sun and I felt like nothing. I had done absolutely nothing for these men, they had served me, and this man gave me a wallet to replace mine to hope that we would not leave them alone. I kept that wallet and used it for years.
I have shared with you some stories of my wife and the life we lived together, or more so the life I lived. After spending two years as a recluse and trying to find a way to live for God after my pride derailed my calling in Dallas, I began exploring chat rooms, Christian chat rooms, and stumbled upon a small little group that angered me from the very beginning with their legalism and sacraments and their lack of faith. I was bitter and angry and I continued to focus my disdain on the leader of this little chat room and her absurd religiosity and her rigidness to sin and her coldness to the human heart and the condition of man. I played devil’s advocate every evening and I do believe there was a time or two I was banned from the room only to be invited to join again. Long story short, the leader of this chat room was Monica.
It was rather incredible as I was completely caught off guard by the presence of God in these conversations and over the course of three or four months there was no chat room but hours and hours of conversations about religion, faith, than relationship, and love, than sex and marriage. She was brought up Mennonite, although no longer part of the church and even at 26 still lived at home with her sisters, 23 and 20 that truly was a Jane Austen book in modern times. There was a darkness about the family though, some abuse that her mother had gone through ( her mom and multiple personalities) and the whole family was simply odd. I do suppose any family I would have met in Eureka, Montana would be weird, but Monica and I were two of the loneliest souls in the world and for months spent hours and hours a night getting to know one another, which turned into hours and hours on the phone, which turned into a life together and a marriage.
We could not have been any different. We know me and my egotism and narcissism, my upper middle class family, my four degrees, my travel and than Monica, never finished high school, had a part time job for two weeks, lived a life of books and afternoon conversations with other single women, much older than her. I could not have been happier.
I had quit Starbucks, that is Barnes and Noble in Dallas. I quit without notice. I reached a point in my life in which I did want to live anymore and I simply did not go to work the next day, I packed my car, left an apartment still furnished with 7 months of a lease, did not pay any of my bills and hid from the world the next two years. With Monica, I found someone who was beyond my travesty, was so simple, so innocent, and through our “courtship” (as she called it) so faithful and obedient that we settled on a life that we wanted and that life was to simply love God and one another. I went back to Barnes and Noble because I took her there on her first visit to Kansas City and we shared a cheesecake there and she fell in love with the place and said it would be a good place for me to work.
She was never going to work. I went to work everyday to provide for the life we wanted. I had to perform because my wife absolutely depended on me in every way. I woke up at 4 in the morning everyday begging God to allow me to deliver on my promises to her and I went to work everyday and made $29,000 my first year which felt like the bounty of the earth for how we lived. She delighted in the life she dreamed she would have and made wonderful meals, and was dutiful in housework and was eager every day the moment I came home. We prayed together, we read books together, she implored me to read to her nightly, she delighted in watching me workout even though she did not have an athletic bone in her body. It was simple. It was pure.
We became active in a church and she began to have a few woman friends who questioned her lifestyle, implored her to get a job, to take care of herself, find some new hobbies. She convinced me, and I compromised that she could work part time, that we needed a new car and that some extra money would take some pressure off of me. I was under no pressure. God led my life and everyday was a fulfillment of a cause. Every customer was an opportunity to share the love and thankfulness of my heart, hear person I hired an opportunity to preach to and to lead to Christ. I openly talked about my faith daily and invited customers and partners alike to church, to dinner…I was being used for God’s will and God was delivering me a happy life.
Monica got a job at a Hobby Lobby, much like Michael’s and within months and met a new kind of woman. This time the women were not Christians, but they were all angry, divorced women who planted seeds of doubt in her mind and she simply was not strong enough to deflect them. She worked, and than worked more, the entire time losing her passions, praying less, becoming sceptical, doubting herself. There is not much reason to share more. God was no longer at work in our lives.
This verse captures all of my feeble attempts to describe what I love about you. The energy you possess, the joy your bring, the fervor in your actions, the kindness in your eyes, the softness of your touch is the embodiment of living and working for the Lord. I have seen love displayed by you that I do not understand and it is uncomfortable and beautiful. I have been convicted so many times of my life for thinking that I am working for the Lord, and my own sinfulness and pride separate me from my inheritance, but I still approach each conversation with a heart to serve God. Even during some of my loneliest days, I have always wanted to serve others, to console, to comfort, to simply love.
I have been punished. God has began to use me again and I hope and pray that I may focus solely on His will and His work and be open to his idea of my inheritance. I simply hope that you know that I stare at you to see love, and not the love that my human heart desires, but a love I long for in action from a God who wants to be seen. I hope you feel that you live this verse.
“I’m writing you this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. If I only had the words to tell you.” - gilead
