thursday thought

I wondered what they thought of me, the men and women holding up their cups or pounding them on the table as I made my way around the room filling them with juice, actually that is what the shelter called it, it was really just sugar water with a little powdered drink mix added in for flavor.  Was I just someone who gave up her lunch hour once every few weeks to serve them meals to make herself feel better to think that she was actually doing something for the plight of less advantaged, a girl who walked over from her air conditioned office building in her fancy work clothes, a girl who was freshly showered just that morning,  someone who is able to put on clean clothes everyday while most of them having been wearing the same clothes for weeks or even months and who have probably not seen soap and water in just as long, I would leave the shelter and go back to my comfortable life where I get three meals a day when many of them were lucky to get one.

There is something sobering about seeing the dirty and nasty parts of the world, and it is even more sobering to know that what I saw in that shelter was hardly the tip of the dirtiness of the world we live in. I wondered how did they get there and how did I get where I was, why were our lives so different?  Were they even thinking anything at all about me or were they just happy to be putting food in their belly that they couldn’t have cared less about who was serving it to them, and I wondered were many of them thinking the same thing I was, how did they get to this place? Or were they too far gone to even care anymore?

Have we become numb to it? We walk down the street and hardly notice them, sometimes we move a little to left as to not walk to close.  Have they become numb to it too?  Used to being invisible to the world in which they live, have the tears long dried up or have they ever shed a tear?  Tears show emotion and feeling, tears show vulnerability something that will get you hurt their hardened world.  

Speaking of the love of God and the power of Jesus seem like trite words to speak to the woman who is prostituting herself to feed the drug and alcohol addiction she picked up to numb the pain of when her father, uncle, brother whomever it was treated her as a commodity for their pleasure, empty words to speak to the child whose abusive parent would burn them with cigarettes or hold their hand over a hot burner or beat them in a drunken rage, trite words to speak to the woman whose husband abuses her, or the barely teenage girl taking care of her brothers and sisters because her father ran off and her mother is a drug addict or the young person who has lost count of their many  suicide attempts.  There is a story behind every sunken face and hollow eyes, vile stories that make us want to vomit, stories that make our hearts race so fast they feel as if they are going to beat out of chest, stories that keep us up at night making us afraid to close our eyes for fear they will haunt us in our dreams. 

Speaking of the love of God and power of Jesus just seems empty, trite and a little dangerous because the questions come and they will come, they always come, we have asked them ourselves, where was the love of God and if Jesus is so powerful why didn’t He use His power to stop was happening? There are no human words plausible enough to explain the questions away.  We can hug them tight hoping that our touch will somehow heal the darkness and make way for the light, we shed our tears and we can love them we can speak of the love of God and the power of Jesus and pray they have enough fight left in them to want to turn towards the light.

What is that we say and that we do, when the questions come that make us stir in our seats, when saying that God loves you, He was with you and He wept for you sounds like we are on loop recording, what is that we say when we have the same questions with no answers, why did the drunk driver have to kill the young mother and her children why couldn’t it have been drug dealer who is selling his venom on the schoolyard or the pimp who stole the girl to make money for himself by selling her body,  why is it that the crafty and wicked of the world get chance after chance after chance but the one who wants to do nothing more than to spread of the love Jesus keeps knocked down, their plans thwarted and doors slammed in their face.  We know we will never escape sin as long as we walk this earth but couldn’t He just put an end to worst of it? 

We know how this all ends, judgment day will come and everything will be reconciled, evil will be defeated.  One day we will live in a place where there is no evil or wickedness, a place where we will never be hurt again, there will no more darkness only light, we will live in paradise one day the place where we will see Jesus.