There was a lot of posting on social media this week in response to multiple heartbreaking events. It’s interesting to see how our desire to make a difference in the world has been relegated to these small squares and sentences. Sharing publicly is now the primary means to taking action.
Instead, I want to share a couple stories. You can decide if they, in their roundabout way, say something about the way we can live in the world.
1.
Behind our home is a narrow alley of restaurants and a few other stores. The rear entry of one place is directly across from us, and for the past couple weeks they have been completely gutting the place. I’ve watched as toilets and ripped out plumbing, old bedding and torn apart paneling have been heaved out the windows, crashing to the ground below. We’ve listened to the jackhammers, and watched the garbage trucks haul away piles of debris.
One morning, I passed the neighbor who lives next to this place, and asked if she knew anything about the renovation— why it was being gutted? She is a young woman with a wild little six year old boy whose hair is pulled back in a queue style ponytail, and she recently became a believer.
“It’s our place,” she told me with a wide smile. “It was a massage parlor, but not anymore.” She was jubilant, joyful, like a bird who had been let out of its cage. Another neighbor had told me about this woman’s transformation. How a friend of hers had led her to Jesus, and how she had begun to read the Bible as though a light had gone on in her head.
But the massage parlor was a profitable business. This woman and her husband had been making a lot of money. The change that was taking place in her life was not entirely welcome by her spouse and business partner.
The the last I had heard about the situation was that she didn’t want to run the massage place anymore, and that her husband was unhappy about it. But after that morning when she ran into me on her little scooter, waving her arms in a greeting like we were fast friends, it seemed that the change in her was having an effect. They had in fact closed down the business and were stripping the rooms down to their bare bones, and the husband was helping to carry the debris away.
Every day I look at that structure, where something rotten and evil once reigned. And I think about what changes people, and what renews a culture, and what it means that light is still shining in the darkness
2.
For three months we have had a university student living with us. She is from Xinjiang, a region you may have read about in the news, where the minority group that lives there is under a lot of restrictions. “G” lived with us because she was unable to get back on her university campus due to continued COVID related lockdowns.
On Monday, G left for a 50 hour train trip back to her hometown. Before she left, I gave her a small copy of the book of John. It’s risky to share materials, because as she says, the authorities are highly “allergic” to anything like this, but the book was small enough that I hoped it might hide away unnoticed. I didn’t know if she would take it, but she did.
We have had conversations about our differences, about our families, about our ways of life and the contrasts in our freedoms, and I know that much of this is a struggle for G. She exists in a difficult tension between exposure to a world that is open and full of opportunity, and a reality that is controlled and restricted in almost every way.
When G asks for advice about her family and the future being mapped out for her, I don’t know what to say.
I give her a room to stay in. I make the chicken she likes and send some with her for the long train. I let her sit on my couch and listen to her stories, and sometimes her tears. I let her make a mess in the kitchen or take up space in the bathroom and when the children feel put out, I tell them this is a way we can love.
I wasn’t sure I could give her the small book, but I did and she took it and all these things feel like seeds put down into the dark black earth.
Do they do any good? Will anything grow? Will she be okay? Is it all for naught?
3.
In a letter John wrote to those struggling in a world of exile and culture crushing tensions, he writes, “Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.”
The economy of God, it appears, is nothing like the economy of our world. If we are imbibing the life of Jesus and letting it flow out of us like streams of living water, the “rights” we fight for and the things we value, will inevitably rub against our natural tendencies.
We tend to think success equals blessing, and wealth equals success.
We tend to think power is influence, and popularity is impact.
We tend to think the self should come first, and generosity second.
We tend to think our rights need protecting, more so than our neighbor.
I am always struck by Jesus response to his disciples when they find themselves on a hillside with four thousand people and nothing to eat. Jesus knows they are in a desolate place, and I find that instructive. He’s not blind to the meager resources. “You give them something to eat,” he says. And they seem incredulous. But he asks them how much they have in their hands, and even though it is clearly not enough, the economy of God works differently than the economy of man.
We all have our own headlines to live with. For me, the events in America can seem far away and somewhat removed from my day to day existence, though I still have an invested interest and concern about them. And I know that what is going on in China is not on the radar for most people who are dealing with the heaviness of shootings and church scandals and deep political divide.
But I think that what shapes our responses and the way we live in our particular places can be formed in the same way, by a God-shaped economy that cuts against the grain. It’s a desolate world we live in— one that likely won’t be fixed by our own two hands, and yet here we are, expected to put them to use. Here is where Jesus says, show me what you have, and I’ll show you I can do.
I always find what you write so thought provoking. Today, the idea that we think posting on social media is 'action' for such big things that are hard to influence. Yet God gives each of us things that we can and should action. Thanks for writing!
Always such a blessing to read. Rejoicing over your neighbors and praying with you over planted seeds. May God continue to abundantly place so publicly.