"Lazerus................"

I have in my possession about fifteen rather lengthy blog entries posted more than five years ago by an Episcopalian minister who administrated the affairs of a huge homeless shelter located within the inner city of Atlanta. Somewhere along the way, as usually happens with most of us who enter this world of voicing our thoughts in this arena, his well ran dry (the history already accumulated, not his devotion to such divine appointment, each new day another story in itself); and as the space between his sharing grew longer, eventually we lost contact with each other. Every now and then I pull these copies from a folder on my desk, attempt a search to renew our acquaintance, but come up empty other than the meal yet contained within his words. Some of it is humorous: the fellow who asked for overnight shelter, but would not enter unless Fred, a dead fish contained in a peanut-butter jar full of milky, polluted water can stay with him, also; an old man (recently widowed, as it would later be learned) who simply wandered away from relatives, his only possession a lawnmower which he refused to surrender; a young mentally challenged individual whose parents’ recent demise brought him “down out of the hills”, seeking refuge from a home with a dirt floor and staying long enough to become self-supporting beyond the mission. It isn’t all comedy, however. This is “down in the trenches”, life-as-it-is accounts of serving those within our society struggling with addiction, with an inability to face the mystery as it came to them, with simply the genetics dealt them at birth. How easy for some of us to diagnose and dismiss the problems, to demand our denominational cures, to dogmatically discern one’s conversion as an immediate altering of all that we are. My friend knew better. He took hope in seeing little changes, insignificant sometimes in terms of “spiritual enlightenment”, but huge in the sense of self-respect gained, battles won. It doesn’t all happen overnight. The journey is not a daily “walk in the park”. The picture is one of poverty, of the human condition as it exists outside stained glass windows and padded pews, and of “Christ in me” as it was meant to be in our life. Not all, of course, are called to such extreme. Each of us must deal with our own situation, our own “tug on the anchor-line”, our own response to the shaping that comes with being placed on the Potter’s wheel. I am thankful for a witness that makes me think…..