“NPR correspondent Chris Ronald is following the financial crisis—“
National Public Radio, 3-3-09

…and John Strodtbeck & company are LIVING the financial crisis. (The realities of having a single income and 3 children are coming into focus in a painfully clear way right now.)

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I’ve had a lot of different writers on my mind right now, but THAT’S not what I wanted to write about either, not exactly…

I’m realizing how terrible I am at following through on the intangible THINGS (for lack of a better word) that living a better, more honest, and (maybe, hopefully) more Christ-like life entails. Or maybe they’re not supposed to be intangible things and I’m only thinking of them that way.

I was reading comments on Amazon.com from people reviewing Brian Mclaren’s book “A Generous Orthodoxy.” I haven’t read it yet, but it amazes me how we’re all (including myself here, ALL) good at arguing about the abstract and the theoretical, and really bad at living what we say we believe. The book generated like 300+ comments with words that I’d never even heard before. (Orthopraxy? Huh?) I couldn’t help but wonder: how many of those people, just like me, are so good at the talk and very poor with the walk???

Case in point: There was this guy who was in my office a few years back, a man living with kids and a mom who has Alzheimer’s. His wife, verbally abusive and neglectful toward him and their kids, was in the process of divorcing him. He was living in a terrible neighborhood at the time, a place full of street fights and drug dealing.

And I did…nothing.

I think at the time he was in my office, his problems seemed so far removed from anything I had experienced that I wouldn’t have even known where to begin helping him. One clerk that I work with took his name and phone number, to help him by at least finding someone who could sit at home with his mom during the day so he could go grocery shopping, spend time with his kids, etc.

So anyway, a couple months ago, he was on my mind and I think God was showing me how I hadn’t done anything for him and I was wishing I had a second chance with THIS specific guy, to do something for him…and then there he was. I ran into him in a bank parking lot after like two or three years and struck up a conversation with him. As it turned out, he hadn’t been living in the area any more because a local police officer had found a better place for him and his kids and mom to live in a nearby town. They’d been renting an apartment there for about a year – and then had lost EVERYTHING in a fire.

I’m talking EVERYTHING. He had the car he was driving, and that was it.

I jumped at this second chance to help him. A house fire I could handle – I’d seen what our Church was capable of the previous year when a relative of an attending family had a house fire and received literally thousands of dollars of gift cards and cash, and tons of used stuff to start rebuilding their home again.

So this time, I helped him in very tangible ways. We made a couple of trips to his house to bring furniture and boxes of household stuff to help out his family. I told friends about his situation and several volunteered stuff to help him out.

But I’m not posting this to pat myself on the back because I don’t deserve it. We all kinda suck when it comes to being ‘good people’ whatever that means. We do things that have nothing to do with real charity and somehow in our minds we give ourselves tally marks. Like if you’re in line in the grocery store and someone you know has forgotten his wallet and he’s scrambling to come up with the cash to buy a gallon of milk; and so you help him out with a few bucks. I think in our minds we say to ourselves, at least I did something helpful today, at least I helped out one person. Right. It’s a nice thing to help him out so he doesn’t have to make an extra trip home to get money – but let’s not call that more than it is. He has the money; and buying a gallon of milk isn’t exactly going to break your budget.

Rarely do we really stretch ourselves to go out of our way to help. We don’t get out of our comfort zones (let’s face it, poor people are not like us, they don’t act like us, they don’t look like us, they don’t smell like us. See my previous post from a few days ago.) And it isn’t as if we give sacrificially, not very often. Not of our wealth or our time.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I include myself in all this. We’re all guilty. I get it. So how do we change it? Seriously. Any suggestions? Please comment below.

How many other opportunities do I miss that are right in front of me because I’m not humble enough to say, God show me what to do and give me the courage to do it. We have little humility, not in our culture. It's one of those unfashionable words like "submit" or "holiness". I guess I can only say this is my prayer for today; for courage to follow through.

And my last thought is this: I think if you believe in an afterlife, something that lasts forever, then I think you have to face this possible reality; that the burden we'll carry forever will consist of the knowledge of what COULD have been had we been paying attention and really trying, instead of thinking or theorizing or talking. And that frankly terrifies me beyond any other version of Hell I’ve ever heard.