I was busily doing work on campus when a girl and a guy sat down next to me. They seemed just like any other girl and guy. They talked about average college things like how bad our food is and how crowded parking is. Eventually, the conversation lead to the girl uttering thins statement, "My heart yearns for community." With the suddenly elevated language, I immediately picked up on what was happening: they'd flipped the Christian switch.
The girl began to talk about how her current rooming situation wasn't ideal. Two roommates were "so strong in their faith" while the other roommate wasn't a believer at all. She talked about how being around this roommate exhausted her. Was the roommate mean? No. Was she combative? No. Was she difficult? No. On the contrary, she was described as being a very sweet girl. She was unbearable simply for not being a Christian. This made her a leech sucking the lifeblood straight from her roommate's body.
I couldn't even believe what I was hearing. The lost roommate is a burden? Wow. What about her soul? What about the fact God loves her just as much as He loves her saved roommates? I couldn't help being outraged and thinking, "What if someone who is lost is hearing this very loud conversation?" If I were a lost person and heard people talking this way, I would run from Christianity as fast as possible. At what point did lost people become a parasite?
We've got a problem here. We've let ourselves pull away into a little Christian bubble. We only talk about Christian things. We only listen to Christian music. We only watch movies with Kirk Cameron in them. (Unless the movie is obviously a Christian allegory. We're all over that.) We read whatever we want to, but our favorite books (the Bible not included) are by Tolkien and Lewis. We attend all the right events, know all the right words, and have just the right bumper stickers or magnets on our cars.
We consider occasionally moving our Bible study to Starbucks evangelizing. We go on prayer walks in communities, but never speak to the people living there. We sit in our pews or our Sunday School rooms behind our nice, big church doors and talk about what we want to do for the world around us. We dream up all these ideas. We send boxes all over the world once a year. All of these things are great, but the truth is, they're so simple. It is so easy to do all these things in our bubble, all together and never separating lest we be swept away by a secular storm.
If this is how we live our lives, we're living them wrong. God called us to be in the world, but not of the world. The key to this is actually being in the world. We can't pull away and have our own little group. We can't give the rest of the world a "You can't sit with us" vibe. We also can't give them a "You can't sit with us unless you become like us" vibe. We are supposed to welcome people and accept them into our lives just as they are. That's what Jesus did.
We all know how people reacted when Jesus went to Zacchaeus' house. They were appalled, but Jesus didn't care. Zacchaeus wanted to see the Lord. We never know what lost person around us has a soul that is dying to see God and to experience His love. Sadly, sometimes they don't. Sometimes we Christians are warm, bubbly, and the epitome of loving when with our fellow believers, but walking into that exact building is like walking into a meat locker for a nonbeliever. Are we really seeing these people? Are we really seeing the lost people we encounter day to day? Or are we just dreaming of the big picture across the country of across the world?
That lost person sitting on the other side of the room or on the other side of your apartment wall has a soul equally as precious as yours. They may not have an End It sticker on the back of their car, have a tattoo in Greek or Hebrew, or own every Rend Collective album. That's perfectly okay. They don't need you looking down on their lost state. They need your love. They need you to take the time to sit with them, listen to them, and let them know they are special. They need a friend who shows them that not all Christians are stuck up and unrelatable. Show them the love that Christ has shown you.
