Love for Community - Countdown Day 17

I heard a presentation once at a conference that stuck with me. The speaker asked us listeners to shut our eyes and imagine our Sunday mornings getting ready for church. Shaving; brushing teeth and hair; chasing down and dressing up kids; throwing down pop-tarts and driving to this place we call church. In that setting, he asked us to consider what was going on around us in our community as we prepared for church those mornings. Did we consider the hurting going on all around us? The lies? Divorce next door? Insecurity across the street? Financial stress around the corner? Broken relationships? Pain? The real lives of the real people who we call neighbors?

In our community in West Houston, that pain is real. Yeah, it is masked and covered up with surroundings and accessories to make us look like we're the people on the pages of the catalogues we receive. But this community is like every other. Affected by the tragedy of lives disconnected from God and faith placed in fleeting things. And in all this mess and filth and hiding and hurt is Christ asking us, the Church - his body, to put him on display for this community.

In Mark 6:31, we find Jesus seeking a quiet place with his disciples to get some rest. His disciples had just gone out on their own through the villages for the first time to share all that they were learning from their rabbi. So verse 32 tells us they take a boat to what they believe will be a solitary place; but they find it's not so solitary. A group of people ran ahead of them on the land to meet them as they came ashore. I don't know what these people looked like, but I'm guessing they were of all kinds. Men, women, children, poor, not-so-poor. And verse 34 very subtly suggests how amazing this Jesus is. Because he looks on them and sees they are without a guide. They have no shepherd. They may be smiling in anticipation. But he sees them as lost and hurting in a very deep way. And it says he had compassion on them. He's tired. His disciples are tired. They sought quiet solitude. But Christ is led by compassion, and that changes everything.

Let us be led by compassion. Not in an obnoxious or arrogant or misplaced way. Not in a way that suggests we have all the answers. But led by compassion in the understanding that pain surrounds us, but it's not the end of the story. Christ's compassion caused him to see these people differently. What if we became that? What if we truly saw those around us in our neighborhoods and supermarkets and little league ballparks with compassion? What if we engaged them in our lives? How would that transform us? And how would that lead to transformation for them? How would our lives and their lives be better?
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Pray that we might be inspired by Christ's love for people. Pray that we might have the wit and wisdom and imagination to share His love. That we might love our community enough to meet them right where they are, introducing them, perhaps for the first time, to the One who loves them beyond measure.
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Posted by Brett Moyer