This came to my attention early this morning, as I was trying to beat my way to a breath. My children have given me their foul cold and I can’t imagine how I am going to ever be well ever again. Go on, click the link while I look for a box of Kleenex.
We’re in rather a dark moment, what with the hundreds of people gunned down in Los Vegas, and so much devastation wrought by the weather. A moment, one might say of fear, of anxiety, of rising up at the sound of birds.
It is curious to me, as a Christian, to occasionally come face to face with the abyssal lack of knowledge about something like the Bible, but really the entire theological and philosophical underpinnings of the last three or four thousand years.
On Thursdays, as part of our soup kitchen, I try to get one or two children to come into my Atrium so that I can read a short bible story, sing a very short song, and pray short prayer. I coax them in with glue and popsicle sticks, with gum, with a promise to listen to their favorite song on YouTube. On average, I have about five minutes total for the prayer, the story and the song before they drift away and lose desire.
This last Thursday, in my coaxing efforts, I got into a kerfuffle over the glue. I have wood glue in the cupboard, because I am always having to mend little people, and stick the corners of boxes back together, and a little girl with an extravagant array of dark curly hair knows very well the code to get into the cupboard. She goes every week and opens the door without being bidden, and I follow her in and take everything out of her hands that she’s collected and make her go out again, because it’s not her room. She particularly wanted my wood glue this week. Nothing else would satisfy her hopes and dreams. She sat herself down on a little baby chair, put her lip out, and told me that nobody every tells her no, No One.
I crouched down on the floor and tried to think what to say. What a terrible claim, if it true. I asked her why she even wanted the wood glue, for which she had no answer. She just wanted it, because. But she has been coming into my Atrium, and my cupboard, for almost a year now, and she has heard, in five minute increments, about the Creation, about Adam and Eve and the Serpent, about Jesus and his death and resurrection. She had some knowledge. Some foundational knowledge, really, and so I went back and circled around Eve and the fruit for a while, and her and my wood glue. We chatted about the difference between taking something and asking for it, about grabbing versus praying.
Later she got in trouble with someone else for stuffing a water balloon down the loo, because she was still angry with me. But not so angry that she could not be coaxed to come in and hear about the angel coming to visit Mary.
I don’t relate this as a way of fluffing myself. Go and be like me. Struggle along in a cluttery church cupboard with a little girl about the possession of wood glue. The point is that the gospel isn’t known even the remotest sense, even in the shadows of memory. No one, if I may be so bold as to disagree with Charles Murray, is really dreaming Christian dreams. It’s all lost, gone, blown away. Indeed, when encountered in the wilds of ordinary life, it produces fear, a terrified thoughtless panic.
So what is a Christian to do? Go into a train and read the Bible out loud to the alarm of several hundred commuters? Hand out tracts? Stand on a street corner with a microphone? It may be that all these are reasonable ways to spread the news that, indeed, death isn’t the end, that there is something after these short, dark days that could be far more glorious, that God really does care about his creation and the world he has made. Certainly the courage that accompanies them makes me shake in my cowardly new grey boots.
There are all kinds of ways to get the news out there (this blog is my preferred way, and it’s safe because I’m mostly preaching to the choir, many of whom already love me). But the least interesting and the most necessary is the one where you go along being true friends with people who you have to see every day, or once a week, or often enough that you can know what makes them anxious and what makes them happy. And then, when the moment is right, introducing bites of new information–one morsel of something about the Bible. And then another time another morsel. So that the knowledge builds, imperceptibly. Because nothing is recovered if knowledge isn’t slowly and truly accumulated. But this means you going on to be friendly for years. It means you not wandering away. It means you sublimating your own self in every conversation. It means you having a conversation.
And all that is very hard. And probably you will never see the reward, the moment of belief, of embracing the truth. Indeed, it would have to not be about you at all, and that so often feels impossible.
On the other hand, said someone one time, though all humanity appears to have forgotten, with God, all things are possible. Pip pip.
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