So this past Friday I took Sarah out for dinner to celebrate her birthday. We were both (and by both I mean me) craving Chinese food, and so we decided to go to this little quaint place about 2 miles from our house called Mee Maw Intimate Chinese Dining & Cuisine.
I'll be honest that "intimate dining" sort of had a weird ring to it that had always kept my wife and I at bay...as if we were going to walk into this place and find some kind of topless adult hangout for creepy middle-aged men.
Luckily the inside was a warm, welcoming, family friendly environment with dim lighting, romantic wall paper, and cute little booths.
After we finished celebrating that we had entered an actual restaurant establishment and not an Asian gentlemen's club, we settled into a both and got to ordering some food.
When our waitress arrived, we were introduced to this soft-spoken, petite, middle-aged Chinese woman, whose name we later learned was Rosina.
Rosina seemed timid, ready for any possible moment in which my wife and I would inevitably morph into blood-thirsty woozles that would pillage and devour her and everyone else in the room. It was obvious to me she was very accustomed to rude and demanding people, and it immediately broke my heart.
Both Sarah and I are very good at being attentive to these sorts of presuppositions, and so to make her night, we really spiced it up and went out of our way to smile and use a lot of polite words like "please" and "thank you".
Almost immediately she went from timid to grateful...and eventually to excited/ecstatic!
Upon the second or third visit to our table as she brought us our Crab Rangoon appetizers and refilled our waters, she looked at us and said- "You are a good match. Good match. You are also so very polite. So often people come in here and they are not polite. They are very (she went onto to impersonate what I can only imagine was an obese middle-aged man demanding more food)."
She would come back several times after this and repeat her compliment to us, praising us like we were celebrities simply because we used polite tone and smiled, treating Rosina like any human being wishes to be treated. We didn't give her a golden trinket or pay for her kid to go to college, but our basic kindness somehow rocked her world (I could only imagine how badly other patrons must have treated her in past encounters).
She would later show her appreciation by giving us extra food- boxes of rice, bags of almond cookies (I LOVE almond cookies), and continuing to tell us how nice and good we were. At that point I was going to ask her if she was in fact some kind of nun or some sort of saint brought there that evening to build up Sarah and my egos, like a high five to our self-confidence.
It was at the point of her bringing us our check that my wife and I asked her her name. She stepped back immediately and looked surprised. 'You want to know my name??', was all I could read on her face.
After she had told us her name and we have received the bill, we gave her our money and tip and offered a final "Thank you so much, Rosina!" as we exited the door.
Well this was apparently the ultimate gesture of our do-goodedness that we had always thought was just common courtesy. Rosina looked at us, with heart-felt warmth in her eyes, and said "You are both so nice, and such a good memory!"
I don't know why I share this story with you. I don't know if I have accurately relayed to you the incredible warmth and genuine beauty in Rosina's spirit. I'm not sure if there is a moral to this story.
What I can tell you is that genuine kindness and treating people with dignity and respect is always a good way to brighten someone's day.
But remember someone's name, and you'll have changed their lives forever!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
A Kingdom Without Borders
So today I heard that the United States government is getting ready to send down troop "reinforcements" to the border states of our country to help "secure" our border and keep "illegal immigrants" out.
It made me think about the story of the good Samaritan that Jesus told, where this Jewish man is jumped by a gang, stripped of his clothes, robbed, and beaten within an inch of his life. He's then left for dead on the side of the road. One by one these prominent people (priests, temple assistants) pass by the man and purposely avoid him, creating borders between the man's heavy burden and their own selfish concerns.
Eventually this Samaritan dude shows up (the type of person the Jewish people would have despised), comes by and has pity on the poor beaten man on the side of the road. He then tends to his wounds, puts him on his own donkey, and takes him to an inn nearby. He then pays the inn like an entire paycheck's worth of expenses to ensure the Jewish man is well-taken care of and can stay in this inn until he has fully recovered. The Samaritan man never asks for anything in return.
I wonder what it would look like if people in America, especially Christians in America, put the good Samaritan story into practice when our government tries to put up walls between us and the rest of the world, when we create borders to divide the "haves" and the "have nots".
So often people quote this story of the good Samaritan for the sake of encouraging the caring of those in need, for helping those who other people simply pass on by. While these are definitely important truths and good analogies, (as my wife pointed out in one of her recent sermons) it is not the main message in the story.
You see, we worship a God of a borderless kingdom. He doesn't see "us and them". He sees humanity, the diverse lot of us, and sees beauty and richness in us all. There is this potential "oneness" that our world is craving, but our borders keep that from ever being realized.
Maybe when our troops get down to the border this week to keep people out, we should be there in masses opening the borders of our hearts and lives and seeing the people on the other side of the wall as brothers and sisters in this world, children of a good God, the Son of Man who has nowhere to lay His head.
Since we have been so richly blessed in this country, and since our ancestors were brave enough to jump the wall and make opportunities where there were none (although sadly we also did some major injustices to our Native American brothers and sisters), maybe we can give those at the border a lift up over those fences.
After all, walls are meant to be climbed.
(To get the real facts about immigration, check out this Princeton University research document that reveals the myths and true facts about illegal immigration in America. http://cmd.princeton.edu/files/POM_june2007.pdf ...don't believe everything Fox News tells you!)
It made me think about the story of the good Samaritan that Jesus told, where this Jewish man is jumped by a gang, stripped of his clothes, robbed, and beaten within an inch of his life. He's then left for dead on the side of the road. One by one these prominent people (priests, temple assistants) pass by the man and purposely avoid him, creating borders between the man's heavy burden and their own selfish concerns.
Eventually this Samaritan dude shows up (the type of person the Jewish people would have despised), comes by and has pity on the poor beaten man on the side of the road. He then tends to his wounds, puts him on his own donkey, and takes him to an inn nearby. He then pays the inn like an entire paycheck's worth of expenses to ensure the Jewish man is well-taken care of and can stay in this inn until he has fully recovered. The Samaritan man never asks for anything in return.
I wonder what it would look like if people in America, especially Christians in America, put the good Samaritan story into practice when our government tries to put up walls between us and the rest of the world, when we create borders to divide the "haves" and the "have nots".
So often people quote this story of the good Samaritan for the sake of encouraging the caring of those in need, for helping those who other people simply pass on by. While these are definitely important truths and good analogies, (as my wife pointed out in one of her recent sermons) it is not the main message in the story.
You see, we worship a God of a borderless kingdom. He doesn't see "us and them". He sees humanity, the diverse lot of us, and sees beauty and richness in us all. There is this potential "oneness" that our world is craving, but our borders keep that from ever being realized.
Maybe when our troops get down to the border this week to keep people out, we should be there in masses opening the borders of our hearts and lives and seeing the people on the other side of the wall as brothers and sisters in this world, children of a good God, the Son of Man who has nowhere to lay His head.
Since we have been so richly blessed in this country, and since our ancestors were brave enough to jump the wall and make opportunities where there were none (although sadly we also did some major injustices to our Native American brothers and sisters), maybe we can give those at the border a lift up over those fences.
After all, walls are meant to be climbed.
(To get the real facts about immigration, check out this Princeton University research document that reveals the myths and true facts about illegal immigration in America. http://cmd.princeton.edu/files/POM_june2007.pdf ...don't believe everything Fox News tells you!)
Monday, July 19, 2010
Keeping Beauty at Arms Length
So today I noticed that most people have one arm or leg that is longer than the other. It was all the observing I could do this morning as I waddled behind other working Chicagoans as we mass exited our trains like penguins and headed to our respective office buildings.
My mind usually takes a good few hours after waking up to process anything remotely productive, so I apologize if this realization misses the blogosphere benchmark of intellectual thought.
Upon first recognizing this distinct feature about most of my fellow human beings, my initial reaction, I confess to you, was annoyance. What kind of person has mismatched arms? Please don’t take me for pretentious. A gentlemen at a shoe store recently pointed out to me that my feet are in fact two different sizes altogether. I share in this shortcoming with each of you, and your struggle is my struggle. I digress.
After my initial annoyance, my mind went elsewhere. I began to think about how the average person spends a few years at a time in life trying to rid themselves of some feature that they dislike about their chemical make up, be it their weight, their eyebrows, their receding hairline, or their crooked or corn yellow-stained teeth.
We look at our airbrushed, spray tanned, fake boobed Hollywood utopian kings and queens as reminders that we are flawed, broken, and incomplete specimens of a failed God, or a natural selection that we cannot naturally compete with.
The funny thing about it all is that it is actually they whom all look alike, who come from the same cookie-cutter mold, and whose limbs are so unnaturally and disgustingly perfect that they look as if their creator (or whoever recreated them) had actually very little creativity. Their souls have been simplified to magazine articles, paparazzi videos, and the characters and art they portray on movie screens and I-Pods.
I started to think- maybe we’re the ones that are beautiful. Maybe we with our unique body builds, eye and hair colors, teeth that point in different directions, are the ones with the creative designer.
Maybe our stylist had such an endless depth of beauty and creativity about Him that Hollywood America had no where to go but backwards.
As I concluded this epiphany that took all of about 1 minute to work through in my head, I began counting the unique features in myself and those around me on my walk, things that no one else could claim as a generic feature, but rather a prototype.
I concluded that Hollywood is boring, and that my occasional love handles and bad hair days reflect a God Who never runs out of creative designs and Who doesn’t see beauty as utopia but rather as unlimited possibilities.
My mind usually takes a good few hours after waking up to process anything remotely productive, so I apologize if this realization misses the blogosphere benchmark of intellectual thought.
Upon first recognizing this distinct feature about most of my fellow human beings, my initial reaction, I confess to you, was annoyance. What kind of person has mismatched arms? Please don’t take me for pretentious. A gentlemen at a shoe store recently pointed out to me that my feet are in fact two different sizes altogether. I share in this shortcoming with each of you, and your struggle is my struggle. I digress.
After my initial annoyance, my mind went elsewhere. I began to think about how the average person spends a few years at a time in life trying to rid themselves of some feature that they dislike about their chemical make up, be it their weight, their eyebrows, their receding hairline, or their crooked or corn yellow-stained teeth.
We look at our airbrushed, spray tanned, fake boobed Hollywood utopian kings and queens as reminders that we are flawed, broken, and incomplete specimens of a failed God, or a natural selection that we cannot naturally compete with.
The funny thing about it all is that it is actually they whom all look alike, who come from the same cookie-cutter mold, and whose limbs are so unnaturally and disgustingly perfect that they look as if their creator (or whoever recreated them) had actually very little creativity. Their souls have been simplified to magazine articles, paparazzi videos, and the characters and art they portray on movie screens and I-Pods.
I started to think- maybe we’re the ones that are beautiful. Maybe we with our unique body builds, eye and hair colors, teeth that point in different directions, are the ones with the creative designer.
Maybe our stylist had such an endless depth of beauty and creativity about Him that Hollywood America had no where to go but backwards.
As I concluded this epiphany that took all of about 1 minute to work through in my head, I began counting the unique features in myself and those around me on my walk, things that no one else could claim as a generic feature, but rather a prototype.
I concluded that Hollywood is boring, and that my occasional love handles and bad hair days reflect a God Who never runs out of creative designs and Who doesn’t see beauty as utopia but rather as unlimited possibilities.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
The Opportunities in our Backyards
Let me confess to you that I am not typically prone to being social.
There was this brief time in high school, when I looked like I belonged in a boy band and played sports, where I thought enough of myself to be loud, outgoing, and probably really obnoxious! But all in all, my whole life I've sort of always been inward expressive, the guy who doesn't usually end up being the life of a party or the guy next door who goes around introducing himself to all the neighbors in the area where he's just moved in.
For this very reason, I spent the first year of my time in Chicago behind the closed doors of my house, inside the parameters of my front lawn, and inside the box of 'me'. Little kids annoyed me and the screaming people in the houses next to ours were just more distractions from my much-needed sleep, rather than echoes of real lives or real people with real issues.
It's amazing that when you think you're living in a world created for you, it's quite easy to drowned out the noises of busy lives all around you. It's easy to treat people like distant faces at arms length, people you can politely smile at but whom you owe nothing more to...ever.
Recently, my wife Sarah was the first between the two of us to break out of this shell, to end her hibernation and begin this thing they call 'living'. Mind you that while she is quite drawn to being social and outgoing unlike myself (it's the youth pastor in her ;)), we both have a tough time taking that first step.
But for me, watching her attempt to walk in new territory like a baby deer daring to cross a park path in the first day of spring, it helps me to follow more assuredly, having more confidence in the ability to bring new lives into mine and share worlds that other worlds dare to tell us belong apart, separated by fences in backyards in neighborhoods where no one knows the other people's first names.
Sarah began this new daring feat by befriending some of the neighbor girls next door and several other kids a few houses down. She began this 'experiment' by introducing herself, learning the girls' names, and sharing small moments of exchanges and light-hearted fun. We were even gunned down with squirt guns on several different occasions while attempting to bring in our groceries from our car (these little girls can be ruthless...haha!)
Now fast forward to several months later (aka present day!). This past week Sarah and I set out a big round table in our front yard, set up a bunch of chairs, fired our mini grill up, roasted some hot dogs and burgers, and had community with these girls, some of their friends, one of the girls mothers, and had our own little impromptu neighborhood social event. I cannot tell you how liberating this was for me, how much it really made me realize the importance of this thing our Bible and our Jesus talk so much about, being created to need one another, to be in relationships with each other.
It's a really real thing. Not just a bunch of painted prose in fairy tales or cute Bible verses. This is the stuff of life. Knowing people by their first names. Knowing their likes and dislikes. Knowing where they work and what they do. Knowing what their lives are like and where they hurt. Knowing how to pray for them and actively participate in being there for them. This is good stuff.
My challenge for everyone today is- have impromptu neighborhood cookouts like once a week...right where you live! Who knows who you'll meet, what you'll learn about, and how you'll grow in those precious moments. Who knows what hurts people have that God wants to use you to be a part of fixing. (We learned two of these little girls just lost their dad a few months back, and very few other neighbors knew about this. Heck, the church next door to my house didn't even know!)
The moral of this story is- Doors, fences, and windows are meant to be broken, and they should be!
There was this brief time in high school, when I looked like I belonged in a boy band and played sports, where I thought enough of myself to be loud, outgoing, and probably really obnoxious! But all in all, my whole life I've sort of always been inward expressive, the guy who doesn't usually end up being the life of a party or the guy next door who goes around introducing himself to all the neighbors in the area where he's just moved in.
For this very reason, I spent the first year of my time in Chicago behind the closed doors of my house, inside the parameters of my front lawn, and inside the box of 'me'. Little kids annoyed me and the screaming people in the houses next to ours were just more distractions from my much-needed sleep, rather than echoes of real lives or real people with real issues.
It's amazing that when you think you're living in a world created for you, it's quite easy to drowned out the noises of busy lives all around you. It's easy to treat people like distant faces at arms length, people you can politely smile at but whom you owe nothing more to...ever.
Recently, my wife Sarah was the first between the two of us to break out of this shell, to end her hibernation and begin this thing they call 'living'. Mind you that while she is quite drawn to being social and outgoing unlike myself (it's the youth pastor in her ;)), we both have a tough time taking that first step.
But for me, watching her attempt to walk in new territory like a baby deer daring to cross a park path in the first day of spring, it helps me to follow more assuredly, having more confidence in the ability to bring new lives into mine and share worlds that other worlds dare to tell us belong apart, separated by fences in backyards in neighborhoods where no one knows the other people's first names.
Sarah began this new daring feat by befriending some of the neighbor girls next door and several other kids a few houses down. She began this 'experiment' by introducing herself, learning the girls' names, and sharing small moments of exchanges and light-hearted fun. We were even gunned down with squirt guns on several different occasions while attempting to bring in our groceries from our car (these little girls can be ruthless...haha!)
Now fast forward to several months later (aka present day!). This past week Sarah and I set out a big round table in our front yard, set up a bunch of chairs, fired our mini grill up, roasted some hot dogs and burgers, and had community with these girls, some of their friends, one of the girls mothers, and had our own little impromptu neighborhood social event. I cannot tell you how liberating this was for me, how much it really made me realize the importance of this thing our Bible and our Jesus talk so much about, being created to need one another, to be in relationships with each other.
It's a really real thing. Not just a bunch of painted prose in fairy tales or cute Bible verses. This is the stuff of life. Knowing people by their first names. Knowing their likes and dislikes. Knowing where they work and what they do. Knowing what their lives are like and where they hurt. Knowing how to pray for them and actively participate in being there for them. This is good stuff.
My challenge for everyone today is- have impromptu neighborhood cookouts like once a week...right where you live! Who knows who you'll meet, what you'll learn about, and how you'll grow in those precious moments. Who knows what hurts people have that God wants to use you to be a part of fixing. (We learned two of these little girls just lost their dad a few months back, and very few other neighbors knew about this. Heck, the church next door to my house didn't even know!)
The moral of this story is- Doors, fences, and windows are meant to be broken, and they should be!
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Pride worth Loving
This past Sunday, a bunch of us went out to the Pride Parade in downtown Chicago to serve as an alternative voice of love between the Church and the LGBT community, as so often the only Christians at these events have large megaphones, harsh words, and condemnation burning on their tongues. We wanted to be different than that, to show that more than anything, the church is a people of love, of God-fearing Christ-like love.
I’ll be honest with you that this was an eye-opening, character-stretching moment in my life. I come from a very conservative Baptist background (nothing wrong with that at all!... inherently), but I was always made to believe that the gay community was some sort of brood of evil-doers, some disgusting and unclean group of fornicating sinners. Many people where I grew up in and around would even go as far to say that homosexuality was a “special sin”, a “greater sin than others”, and that God wanted nothing to do with these people, nor should the church have any interaction with their community. All the while I had always wondered where these claims came from, what they were based on, where these ideas were found in Scripture, and if anyone back home really even knew someone who is gay, much less understood anything about their culture, their perspectives, or anything that related to the people and faces we were giving mere labels and distant finger-pointing to (while covering our eyes and blinding ourselves from being people who engage rather than enrage).
My perspective of the LGBT community and the church’s role amidst this community started to change when I became friends with several amazing guys at two consecutive places I’ve worked over the past 2 years. These people became my friends, good friends, and the LGBT community was given a face (several faces :)) in my life. I started to ask questions, have dialogue, and engage a community I had never engaged before- a community I had all the answers for but knew nothing about. It was a group of wonderful people I had ignorantly hated, avoided, and condemned before ever talking to and learning from.
Let me stop right now before I continue and say to you all that this blog in no way is meant to be pro or anti gay. If you are awaiting my conclusion on my views of homosexuality, you might as well start reading someone else’s blog. This in itself is one of the major problems creating this gap between the church and the LGBT community. We’re always trying to talk about a stance rather than talking to and listening to people with honest opinions and genuine perspectives. This is what distracts us. People always want to talk about Satan/the devil being associated with lifestyle choices and all that, and yet one of his most successful/proven ways of spreading evil is by getting the good people in the church to wage war against the good people in the LGBT communities, the Muslim communities, the Catholic communities, the poor communities, etc. The more we get distracted, the more love is replaced by judgment, faith is replaced by religion, and whole communities are completed isolated and feel ousted by the church. Shane Claiborne once said that if the homosexual community cannot find a home in the church, then where can they find a home and what have we as the church become?
I went to this parade as an outsider, as a person apologizing on behalf of the church for the way we have hated and judged the gay community. It was to let a community know that we are more than megaphones and hate, that we are a people of unconditional, sacrificial love, and that the Jesus we serve would be hopping up on the floats in the parade, grabbing every man and woman He sees, embracing them, looking them in the eyes and saying- “I love you, and I always will”. I left this parade as a part of a new community, friends with people I would have never talked to in my younger days and immature stages of faith, and full of the love Jesus had everywhere He walked on this earth and everywhere He still shows up, begging the church to simply and genuinely- love!!!
Throughout the entire parade Sunday, people on floats and those walking in the parade would pass our area, see our t-shirts and signs that said “I’m sorry” and why we were sorry, and being completely amazed and happy to see Christians showing love rather than judgment, talking about unity rather than hellfire. One of the most amazing moments came when a particular float went by and this young man looked over at our spot in the crowd and saw us standing there with our t-shirts and signs of love and reconciliation. At first, he assumed we were the typical Christian megaphone protestors, there to show our disgust and words of judgment on their community. But as the float turned the corner, his eyes stayed glued to the signs and shirts. All at once, I saw the imaginary light bulb go off in his head as he realized what we were doing there and what we were saying and representing. He immediately jumped up, hopped off of his float and ran back to us, diving into our arms and, with tears held back, simply said over and over again “Thank you”. I will never forget that moment, being hugged by someone I was told to distance myself from, sharing God-like love with people while the stereotypes of religion and world attempted to keep us apart saying that we do not belong together. I remembered at that moment the words of Billy Graham- “It is God’s job to judge, the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, and our job to love”. I love my job. I get to love, to love like Jesus.
I will always be a different kind of Christian having been a part of this parade, having friends from a walk of life I am still processing, still digesting, still working out in my own faith journey. Above all, I will always remember that there are some things we can always debate, some issues people in the church and world alike will take opposing views on, but that in the end there is never a debate around love. Love is never called into question, and love can never be wrong.
As our good friend and author Andrew Marin says (and is the title of his amazing book), love is an orientation.
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”. – 1 John 4:16
“We love God because He first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen”. – 1 John 4:19-20
You can see photos from the parade at http://www.loveisanorientation.com/ or http://www.maladjustedmedia.com/ (ours start at like around photo #160).
I’ll be honest with you that this was an eye-opening, character-stretching moment in my life. I come from a very conservative Baptist background (nothing wrong with that at all!... inherently), but I was always made to believe that the gay community was some sort of brood of evil-doers, some disgusting and unclean group of fornicating sinners. Many people where I grew up in and around would even go as far to say that homosexuality was a “special sin”, a “greater sin than others”, and that God wanted nothing to do with these people, nor should the church have any interaction with their community. All the while I had always wondered where these claims came from, what they were based on, where these ideas were found in Scripture, and if anyone back home really even knew someone who is gay, much less understood anything about their culture, their perspectives, or anything that related to the people and faces we were giving mere labels and distant finger-pointing to (while covering our eyes and blinding ourselves from being people who engage rather than enrage).
My perspective of the LGBT community and the church’s role amidst this community started to change when I became friends with several amazing guys at two consecutive places I’ve worked over the past 2 years. These people became my friends, good friends, and the LGBT community was given a face (several faces :)) in my life. I started to ask questions, have dialogue, and engage a community I had never engaged before- a community I had all the answers for but knew nothing about. It was a group of wonderful people I had ignorantly hated, avoided, and condemned before ever talking to and learning from.
Let me stop right now before I continue and say to you all that this blog in no way is meant to be pro or anti gay. If you are awaiting my conclusion on my views of homosexuality, you might as well start reading someone else’s blog. This in itself is one of the major problems creating this gap between the church and the LGBT community. We’re always trying to talk about a stance rather than talking to and listening to people with honest opinions and genuine perspectives. This is what distracts us. People always want to talk about Satan/the devil being associated with lifestyle choices and all that, and yet one of his most successful/proven ways of spreading evil is by getting the good people in the church to wage war against the good people in the LGBT communities, the Muslim communities, the Catholic communities, the poor communities, etc. The more we get distracted, the more love is replaced by judgment, faith is replaced by religion, and whole communities are completed isolated and feel ousted by the church. Shane Claiborne once said that if the homosexual community cannot find a home in the church, then where can they find a home and what have we as the church become?
I went to this parade as an outsider, as a person apologizing on behalf of the church for the way we have hated and judged the gay community. It was to let a community know that we are more than megaphones and hate, that we are a people of unconditional, sacrificial love, and that the Jesus we serve would be hopping up on the floats in the parade, grabbing every man and woman He sees, embracing them, looking them in the eyes and saying- “I love you, and I always will”. I left this parade as a part of a new community, friends with people I would have never talked to in my younger days and immature stages of faith, and full of the love Jesus had everywhere He walked on this earth and everywhere He still shows up, begging the church to simply and genuinely- love!!!
Throughout the entire parade Sunday, people on floats and those walking in the parade would pass our area, see our t-shirts and signs that said “I’m sorry” and why we were sorry, and being completely amazed and happy to see Christians showing love rather than judgment, talking about unity rather than hellfire. One of the most amazing moments came when a particular float went by and this young man looked over at our spot in the crowd and saw us standing there with our t-shirts and signs of love and reconciliation. At first, he assumed we were the typical Christian megaphone protestors, there to show our disgust and words of judgment on their community. But as the float turned the corner, his eyes stayed glued to the signs and shirts. All at once, I saw the imaginary light bulb go off in his head as he realized what we were doing there and what we were saying and representing. He immediately jumped up, hopped off of his float and ran back to us, diving into our arms and, with tears held back, simply said over and over again “Thank you”. I will never forget that moment, being hugged by someone I was told to distance myself from, sharing God-like love with people while the stereotypes of religion and world attempted to keep us apart saying that we do not belong together. I remembered at that moment the words of Billy Graham- “It is God’s job to judge, the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, and our job to love”. I love my job. I get to love, to love like Jesus.
I will always be a different kind of Christian having been a part of this parade, having friends from a walk of life I am still processing, still digesting, still working out in my own faith journey. Above all, I will always remember that there are some things we can always debate, some issues people in the church and world alike will take opposing views on, but that in the end there is never a debate around love. Love is never called into question, and love can never be wrong.
As our good friend and author Andrew Marin says (and is the title of his amazing book), love is an orientation.
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”. – 1 John 4:16
“We love God because He first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen”. – 1 John 4:19-20
You can see photos from the parade at http://www.loveisanorientation.com/ or http://www.maladjustedmedia.com/ (ours start at like around photo #160).
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