A friend of mine was asking some questions and speaking of his desire to do what God says and speaking of his seeming lack of actual desire to do it, and I posted a response that seemed more directed at my own life than his...so I am going to share it here because maybe there is someone else who needs to hear it too...
Working in a hospital environment like I do tends to make me sort of
calloused to the needs of others. Every single day, I go to my dead-end
job of parking people's cars, and every day I see people who's loved
ones are dying or who's children are suffering from various cancers or
men who can no longer speak and have one of those little electronic
voice boxes that makes them sound like that robot at the beginning of
the Beastie Boys song "Intergalactic," and, more often than not, I
don't give a damn. I want to care, but more often than not, I just
don't.
Or at least that is what I used to think.
For the summer, we hired on a 20 year old college student who was the
daughter of one of the laziest workers we have. But this girl had a
heart bigger than she could handle. A 16 year old boy was in a car
accident and was on life support. The family came every day for two
weeks and she built a relationship with them. When the boy died, she
could not recompose herself and dry her tears all day. A man came in
with a different one of his five daughters every day due to some
internal problems. They were doing tests and prepping him for surgery.
The doctors opened him up, and found his insides consumed with a cancer
the tests couldn't detect. He was given two weeks. We never saw him
again. She cried.
I think most Christians are insulated from the world around them in
much the same way as non-Christians. Cancer, hunger, poverty kill most
people inside, so we put up buffers between us and those problems and
choose, rather, to debate politics and theology and who the best
baseball team is. And, in an ironic twist, we watch reality TV to
escape reality.
Maybe I am saying all of this more for myself than for you, but we
minister unto the world by living as Jesus did. And we can, and should,
do this in our middle-class and dead-end jobs. We can have as many
Bible studies and prayer groups and worship sessions and Sunday
services and Christian books as we want, but if that doesn't translate
into (even flawed) actions, then it is all a waste and is worthy of
being flushed with the rest of our daily crap. The Prophets stated it,
in God's Name, as a question: Why do you call Me "Lord, Lord" but don't
do what I tell you?
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