The woman talking struck me as the quintessential church lady. She was proper and spoke with authority when she was in charge of something. I imagine she might even wear a hat to church most Sunday mornings. She wondered about the people staying at her church as part of the emergency housing program both our congregations participate in.
"Is it ok to give him bandages? He had bloody marks all over him. They looked a lot like the ones you get when you use meth and start scratching. I didn't want to do anything I shouldn't."
She was assured that giving bandages was just fine and reminded to use gloves around blood. She nodded in agreement and we moved on to something else.
Too often the church has an image of only caring about being squeaky clean, pronouncing alcohol and cussing taboo for its members. My church pronounces neither taboo, for the record.
More importantly, though, most of the church folks I've known have never shied away from the grittiest, dirtiest places around. They go to the missions and soup kitchens in the worst parts of town, and do so willingly.
I think, even more surprisingly, they take their kids with them. In some cases, they let me take those kids.
The tweens never know how to make conversation, but the older kids, 15 or 16, do. And they sit and talk with drug addicts who will likely never seek recovery. They learn to leave alone the person talking to people only he sees.
Afterwards, I get the questions.
Why was that man shaking?
Why did she talk funny?
Why wasn't I allowed out where all the people were waiting?
They're hard questions. They mean talking about drugs and alcohol and how those two things can change people. They mean talking about mental illness. They mean talking about broken healthcare systems. In at least one case, going to the place that most needed help meant having a pre-emptive talk with kids about drug paraphernalia and making sure they knew what a condom looked like once it was out of the package so that they didn't pick up either of those things. The parents that I talked with before the conversation, knowing they guard their children carefully, all said, "Of course."
Never, not once, were kids offered a cautionary tale. No "See now, don't use drugs!" No "This is why you need to stay in school!"
It wasn't about scaring them straight or scaring them at all. It was about making sure they were in relationship with people very different from them, people also beloved by God. The conversations were rooted in the reality that people on both sides of the serving line need each other.
The very fact that, for the most part, we had to travel several miles to get to the soup kitchens means that we're still broken. Poor and doing ok still live too far apart. We're still far from the reign of God if such interactions aren't part of our daily lives.
Still, when you sit a twelve year old kid from the suburbs next to a man who has been living on the streets for most of his life, and serve them both dinner, and watch them figure out how to talk to each other, you're a bit closer to the reign of God.
And the lack of squeaky cleanness is a big part of what makes it holy.
No comments:
Post a Comment