Shalom Existence

Last week I was driving my car in downtown Atlanta and I just turned to my husband and said, “You know, people are looking for something real, not something different.” And I think it’s very true. In a recent post I talked about realizing we need to roll up our sleeves and get dirty, and I never thought that was more real before this weekend. Driving through the streets of Atlanta is normal for me now, but I remember when it wasn’t.

I remember as a child wrinkling up my nose to the stench of urine on one street, and looking wide eyed from my car windows to the high rise condos less than half a mile away, Wondering perhaps, where the celebrities of the moment were living, what kind of jobs or lives these people led. I didn’t much wonder about the lives of those that lived on the streets of stench. I knew from the smell that their lives were different, not all happy and not all full of the things that we are so programmed to desire.

I remember when it did hurt my heart, it still does, but not in the way that it interferes with my concept of reality. It no longer immediately strikes my heart- it shouldn’t be this way. For it has always been this way. With newer condos and more trash, the divide only seems to be getting wider. And the church, for the most part, still isn’t speaking against the stuff that purports these divides. I would say that it’s okay to attain stuff, but I am no longer sure that it is. I am not sure, because I see Christ followers that wouldn’t give it away. Not even if begged. And now the church is getting to the point where they are saying it is neccessary for them to have this “stuff” to minister. I understand using things for the glory of God, but if people are really looking for what’s real, not just what is new and different, do we really have to use this stuff to compete with the world? We aren’t using it all for the glory, we are using it to get noticed. I love what Len Sweet said- “I hate the word relevant….because the church doesn’t have to try to be relevant. Jesus is always relevant!” Don’t we already have what everyone is wanting, what everyone is hungry for? We don’t have to use our methods to sell it. In some ways, it can even cheapen it. The way we have been doing things show no difference between us and the world. In fact, it condones and advertises its ways. I cannot buy into it anymore. It is to the point where it is making me physically ill. And I feel alone at times, and I feel negative, and cynical, but I pray and I cry out and it doesn’t change, the feeling- that conviction about our responsibility to rebuke it and show Jesus’ message in a way that is JUST that- doesn’t go away. But godly people all around me are buying in, they are eating it up, and I simply don’t know what to do. I don’t know God. I don’t know.

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