Field Notes

Will I ever crawl out of the pool of invisibility? Will the people I try to love?

And when will it cross the minds of the general, charitable, public that the core need of the most vulnerable, broken, addicted and poor of humanity is not for things?

It’s not about supply and demand when you’re in the business of love and the tangible gospel. Because, even if you have the food, the water, the clothes needed, or the truth worth speaking, someone’s hands have to give, someone’s mouth has to speak. Deeper than that? Those “someones” have to actually care.

And the hearer, the receiver has to know that they do.

All humans present must be seen as such; humans-fellow persons. This is an encounter of mutual dignity and humility, if not all-out humiliation.

The poor do not need to be reminded that they are poor, through our words or actions, and certainly not through our silence and inaction.

How do you know you’ve been forgotten about?

No one shows up to prove you wrong.

The “sin of seperation” is of epidemic proportions, even within christianity.

Society and economy have dictated where we should or shouldn’t go, who we should or shouldn’t engage with, and worst of all who “deserves” us and who doesn’t.

Did not our own Lord confine himself to the embodiment of humanity, poverty and indignity becoming a “man of sorrows aquainted with grief?” (Isaiah 53:3) Did He not lower himself lower than the ground we walk on, digging out lost dignity from the bowels of hell itself, reclaiming what was lost for the sick, the lonely, the sinner, the hopeless?

Two words, “Lower Still” are deeply engrained in my soul and psyche. Sometimes too deeply, as in buried. I forget them in practice all too often.

Before we can pull someone up higher, we have to bring ourselves down to the level from which they need to climb. Most aren’t ready to get up at first. They may not move, much less “change” for weeks, months, even years.

We are impatient and pressured to succeed, produce, impress. We use false reasonings such as, “If I don’t wish to get stuck, I better stop spending time with people who are stuck,”

“If I want to win, I can’t hang around losers,” and, “If I want to make money, I can’t work for the poor.”

Jesus had one mission-His Father’s.

He didn’t live for himself.

When our “success” falls on the shoulders of obedience to God, rather than approval of man, the entire scope changes. We can see and share life with those who are unseen, and feel what they feel, even invisible.