A Rainy Window, A Dusty Mirror, A Prayer

We sat in the car at 1am as rain drifted down the windshield. An old friend who drove me to the comedy club earlier. He was the son of a pastor and a youth pastor at one time himself. We talked about faith and brokenness and the church. My favorite kind of conversation.

A friend of his wanted to set him up with a nice girl from church but he said no.

“I don’t think I can do polished christianity anymore”

When you go through significant trauma and tragedy, it unearths something in you. By shovel or by mortar, it upends the performer. The things that once seemed so important start to fade. As you rebuild yourself, the taste for appearance and false belonging grows quiet. You start to question what you’ve been taught and start to see the gaps in the performances around you.

When I met God, I was a very different person. The details aren’t so important, but I was the last person anyone expected to find in a church pew. I didn't call Him into my life or beg Him to save me. Rather, he intervened. For the first time, I experienced true love. It transformed me from the inside out.

I fell in with a rather evangelical group. Prophecy and evangelizing. Legalism wrapped up in the guise of freedom was the norm. It’s so common in church culture. We have a few things we celebrate, many things we demonize. There are sins we accept and sins we find unforgivable. The more I observed this new world, I too saw the cracks in these performances.

The good Christians who never cussed and always did what they were told also never stopped for the homeless man. They didn't have compassion for those who wronged them. The only grace they extended was to those who they saw as lesser. They helped the needy at a scheduled time in a scheduled place. Their faith and their understanding lived within the confines of their own control. They were quick to judge and slow to understand. They were never curious. Never ever curious. Those who have all the answers have no need to be.

As I became more disillusioned with this polished Christianity, I also spent time with very different people. People who loved God and hated the church. People with face tattoos and a drinking problem and a curse waiting on the tip of their tongue. The more time I spent with them, the more I saw their intimate capacity for compassion. They knew the homeless man on the corner by name. They forgave people who wronged them without a thought. They understood the human struggle with guilt and shame and treated others the way they wanted to be treated. Because of their own pain and their own mistakes, there was no judgement for the other.

They weren’t perfect, far from it. But this judgment and separation I often experienced in Christian circles was as distasteful to them as it was to me.

“The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred until the sacred in them remembers” - Sarah Durham Wilson

It was a rare Sunday morning when I didn’t have Roman and I sat in the pew past the end of service. As I prayed over Palestine and stared at the cross, I felt a gentle nudge to say hi to the man sitting a few pews forward. There’s still that initial resistance in me when I feel God asking me to do something I don’t understand. At this point, that resistance has very little power over me.

As I went and introduced myself, the pastor came up and sat with us and a mutual friend sat in the pew in front of me. We all prayed together.

This image came through. It was me, cleaning off a dusty window to see the person on the other side more clearly. As I did, my own reflection in the window became clear. The message was simple. The more we are willing to clean the window and see the other through the eyes of God, the more clearly we are able to see ourselves.

I don’t mean this to be a harsh judgement on people in the church who are still navigating their own judgement and relationship with God. I think it is a beautiful thing when someone rejects so much of this world and lives, to the best of their ability, by the Word of God. I guess this is more of a prayer. A prayer that we create more space and community within the walls of our faith for people who live differently than how we were taught. That instead of condemning someone for their identity, sexuality, self-expression, life circumstances or own faith, that we ask questions. That we remain curious. That we seek God to help us see them through His eyes and treat them with the very love that has transformed us. It is a daily practice. One I am still learning.

Even as I write this, God has brought up circumstances and people in my own life who I have treated with judgement rather than love. I will be meditating on this myself, on how to create a pause just long enough to let His love flow through.

“Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From Him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” Ephesians 4:15-16