After I’d been a youth minister for almost a week, at a Lutheran church in Michigan, a man came into our church building asking to see a minister. My senior pastor was out and our secretary sent the visitor down to my office.
“I left everything behind to move here and start a new life,” he told me. “This was supposed to be a great adventure. Now I’ve lost my job and my car, and I don’t have a place to stay.” He was having an especially hard time, he said, because none of the social service agencies in town were really set up to work with him, since he was a college-educated, middle-aged regular guy, not someone who would usually be considered “at risk.”
“What can I do for you?” I asked him.
“Pray for me,” he said. “Just pray.” He wouldn’t stay and pray with me, just asked me to pray for him after he’d moved on.
I told that story a few weeks ago to the confirmation class, the 8th graders who are getting ready to be adult members of the church. And it’s been on my mind ever since that evening.
Did the man who visited me only ask for prayers because he thought that was all I would offer in the first place?
I was on my way home for lunch. I had a fridge full of sandwich fixings and if he’d stayed one more minute, I would have realized I could have offered him a meal.
I had a couch– not a great one, but comfortable enough for a night. If he’d come over for lunch, I could have figured out that what I had and what he needed matched up.
It would have been weird for a stranger to offer those things, but a Christian stranger’s life is supposed to look weird. Why wasn’t my life more weird? Why isn’t it weirder today?
When Jesus debuted his ministry at the synagogue, he read (in Luke 4) ”The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Isaiah 61)
If that was Christ’s mission, it must be my mission too.
what a “welcome” into ministry that must have been. weird, set apart, different…
good thoughts.
i wonder how to make the “weirdness” deeper than the skin – where our very lifestyle reflects Christ. not living on the road, selling our possessions (necessarily), but a lifestyle of prayer, service, love. what would that REALLY be like? lets not just settle for a little weird. let’s be radically different.