Swing and a Miss

I was almost stoned for being a Christian once. Honest.

Well, I wasn’t exactly being stoned. But I was attacked. And it did come as a result of me trying to follow Jesus.

When I was in college, I was involved in a campus ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ or, as everybody abbreviated it for a friendlier and less sword fight-y image – Cru.

Cru was really the main reason I stayed in college. I hated classes; didn’t much care for my major. But I loved the community that came from student ministry. I feel like those two years that I was involved in Cru during my junior and senior years, were hugely impactful on my life. It’s where I started to see the foundations of my walk with God built.

Well Cru is a national organization and every year during the first week after New Years, about 2,000 college students would meet for the Denver Christmas Conference (DCC). DCC was a week of seminars and rocking worship music, adventurers through the shopping district, young men passively aggressively trying to woo women with poor acoustic guitar playing in the lobby, and then those same men sitting in a windowless room trying to learn how to stop lusting. It was generally a very exciting week.

I got to know many great people at DCC, people I had seen hanging around our weekly Cru meetings and events at NWMSU, but had never talked to. There’s something about Denver and snow and the mountains that just makes you want to have long, deep, discussions about theology and life and romance and music, etc.

Well during DCC, there’s this day –secular people call it Wednesday—Christians call it Wednesday too, but just not during DCC. During DCC, Wednesday is actually The Day of Faith. Unless you are a skier; then it’s called Ski Day. Skiing ability, surprisingly, has a huge impact on the direction of a Christians spiritual journey.

Well I didn’t know how to ski, so on Wednesday, during my first year at DCC in 2006, I went on the Day of Faith. I teamed up with a couple girls I had known and a defensive end from NWMSU. We stood in line, organized by bicep size, so it went the defensive end, the two girls, a mop in a mop bucket, and then myself.

A man at the front of the line handed everybody an unlabeled manilla envelope about ten inches by fourteen inches big. Inside the envelope was a mission that you were randomly assigned. Some people got cleaning of houses. Some people got the job of painting an old church building that was in need. The unlucky ones got stuck with door-to-door evangelism – the most awkward of jobs. I was in line hoping for something safe, not too hard, and low-risk.

I didn’t really want to go on the Day of Faith. I would’ve gone skiing, except that I feared a shattered femur more than what the Day of Faith would hold.

When we got our envelope, the girls tore it open, very excited about what would be inside. And when they opened it, at the top of a map with directions and emergency contact info, was this phrase: TAKE A HOMELESS PERSON OUT TO LUNCH.

I stared at it. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. I had asked God for an easy and safe task. Something like folding napkins for an orphanage or delivering mail for a nursing home – instead I was going to have to take a homeless person (possibly even two or three) out to lunch.

Now it wasn’t that I was cheap. I had no problem paying for somebody else’s meal. I had been saving up money for years, hoping that a pretty girl would let me buy her a hot meal. But that wasn’t about to happen anytime soon, so if not a pretty girl, why not a homeless person?

And it wasn’t because I was a germ-a-phobe. My father raised a handful of pigs and chickens each summer as a hobby and so dirt and filth never bothered me.

So why did I not want to hang out with a homeless person? I just didn’t want to get stabbed. Growing up in a small town, all I ever heard about how the cities were full of deranged homeless gangs who would stab you, rob you, murder you, and then stab you with a dirty needle without thinking twice about it.

As the defensive end (lucky, muscle-bound bastard), the two girls (both of whom were twice as fast as I am dumb), and I (S.O.L. genetically) walked into a city park where homeless people frequented, I was scared. I tried to play it cool around the two girls, but I also tried to buddy up the defensive end, because he was the only one who could protect me.

It wasn’t long after we had gotten to the middle of the park that the two girls approached a middle-aged traveler who was lying on a dirty, green blanket playing a small, electronic poker game.

I don’t remember the conversations that kicked off our interaction. What I do remember though, was the immense amount of shame that washed over me soon after.

There are times when God lets us ramble. He lets us drone on and on and on about what WE are thinking and what WE are feeling and what WE are worried about. He lets us just talk and talk and then, almost without warning, He sums up what we’ve been rambling on about in a simple action, or a verse of scripture, or a scene like the one I was watching. And then when we’ve scene our universal proofs of our own rightness played back to us we realize:

“I am a complete and utter moron.”

I remember standing to the side as these two girls conversed with this homeless man. They treated him like he was somebody that they went to school with, not a man who slept under bridges. They listened to him like a man who’s words were worth listening to, not like a man who hadn’t bathed in who knows how long.

The man was very warm. He was kind. He told stories of his family and how he’d ended up on the street and how he hoped to get off the streets when he was ready. He talked about the hard times but he also talked about the times when he had felt truly blessed.

As I watched this exchange for an hour or so, I realized that, the homeless man wasn’t dirty. I was. He was going to stab me or kill me or rob me. He was just content to talk to people who saw him as an equal and not as a stain.

This really opened my heart to the idea that I can’t be the judge of people. I can’t make assumptions. Because God will prove me wrong. I think God loves to prove me wrong with my assumptions of people. And I thank God that He is a God who loves to prove me wrong.

For me, the 2006 Day of Faith was a day where I saw that I serve a God who loves people. I realized that I follow a God who loves unconditionally, regardless of our past or present circumstances.

The end.

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Oh. Yes. I forgot to tell you how I almost got stoned for my faith.

Well, as soon as DCC 2006 was over, I was counting down my calendar until DCC 2007 and the Day of Faith. I was excited to not be hesitant and to really throw myself into whatever God would challenge me with.

So when DCC 2007 came, I teamed up with a group of about seven people to go to the Aurora area of Denver. We stood in line. I was excited and ready to sprint out of our hotel and into adventure. We received our envelope and our task was to clean the homes of Spanish-speaking people of Denver.

Yes, I thought, this is perfect. It has everything I wanted: humility, serving, mingling with a people-group I never encountered, and mystery – How would God work that day?

We rode a bus out to Aurora. It was about 40 minutes and I grew impatient waiting for OUR stop, the stop where we would go out and represent God. We finally got to our stop and we got out to walk then next 4 blocks to our neighborhood.

As we were walking, we decided to have some fun and I started throwing snowballs at the girls. The threw some back. It was just some fun, frozen-water artillery, fellowship.

But then one girl threw at me. Not so much at me, as to my left. And down. Almost like throwing a strike in baseball. I threw my arms down toward the snowball to catch it. And before I knew it, I was bent over home plate. And then my friend Micah, with the power of Barry Bonds in him that day, take a swing over home plate with a bag full of cleaning chemicals (including a lovely can full of oven cleaner that weighed about ten pounds).

The bag caught me just under the right eye, splitting my cheek and spilling my red, red blood into the white, white snow.

While my Christian brothers and sisters were faithfully serving complete strangers, I was sitting in an Aurora emergency room waiting for stitches.

I learned something about that day too. God has a sense of humor and as much as we want to be the servers, we have to allow ourselves to be served too. Perhaps by a girl who is studying to be a nurse as she holds paper towels to your bleeding face, perhaps by a conference organizer who drives you to the hospital despite his complete confusion about how anybody can get injured cleaning a house, and by frazzled doctor who feels blessed that he finally gets a patient who isn’t in risk of dying.