Pay Attention

“Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we're in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.” 

― Frederick Buechner

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Dear Kate,

When does Common Grace become commonplace, as in our taking it for granted and feeling indifferent about it?

Or you don't even know what I am talking about?

Here is a classical definition: "Common grace, as an expression of the goodness of God, is every favor, falling short of salvation, which this undeserving and sin-cursed world enjoys at the hand of God; this includes the delay of wrath, the mitigation of our sin-natures, natural events that lead to prosperity, and all gifts that human use and enjoy naturally."

Maybe I can shut up already after giving you this very offensive definition.  Maybe you are already thinking, who the hell would still talk about an angry God, sin and curse and salvation?  If I've just made you feel morally superior to me, not least on a Monday morning, well, You are welcome.

Recently I heard someone saying we Christians, the particular brand that you and I share, are doing pretty well, being common grace for the common good (or so the person implied), not and never need to be like those "other" Christians, going oversea to do this and that for God, etc.  I needed to walk away from this sort of talk because my stomach would churn. Ingratitude is one thing, but contempt?

I, being a "Gentile," and you too, if not for someone boneheaded enough to take the Holy Spirit seriously and bring the Good News to my people, would not have known Jesus at all, and, by the way, you and I would have never met in church years ago, and our moral and cultural fabric would have been cut from a different piece of cloth.  Let's not even speak about our "salvation."

The glibness in our judging of "other" Christians not only judges ourselves, but also God and His mysterious way.  We are being colonized by the easy moralism of this world as we claim to smash colonialism, sins of our fathers and mothers that we, of course, would have never succumbed to were we the ones to have been born in their day and age.

When I was young, every time when a missionary came to give a talk I would ask the same question, not every time out loud, but every time urgent and serious: How do you speak to others about a different religion without somehow imposing on them something foreign and judgmental, undermining their own culture?

I've never gotten myself a satisfying answer.

Until I met Jesus, who gave himself as the answer, in the shape of a cross.  Jesus, the true Shepherd who gave His life to find that one lost sheep, the One True Man who calls out those who are faking it.

Remember the Sunday School story about Solomon's wise judgment when two women came to him, fighting over who's a baby's real mother, and the fake one couldn't care less if the king is to do some common division and chop the baby in half and call that fairness?  "The real mother of the living baby was overcome with emotion for her son and said, 'Oh no, master! Give her the whole baby alive; don’t kill him!'"

This world is killing us and our real Father cares, so much so that He gave up his Son.  And His true Son knows the Father's heart and does His will.  The false parents treat the wound of little children carelessly, saying, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace.

The day we see in the eyes of a stranger the longing of our own children and our hearts burn to give ourselves away to answer to the longing is the day we say, Jesus, in your obedient steps we will follow, to die to your same death, and be fully alive in you.  (Many missionaries died for strangers like you and me.  Guess why.)

Or we can continue to stay on our moral high horse, wrestle not with the paradoxes and ambiguities of doing good in a fallen world, congratulate ourselves for the morality carwash we give every Sunday, and--the most tell-tale sign of our unfaithfulness--bear no fruits.

This world is a beautiful place.  This world is an ugly place.  You can only see it for real with tears in your eyes and feel with nails through your wrists.

Yours, Alex