Good morning, and welcome!
Some time ago, my friend, writer
Kendra Broekhuis, started a monthly email publication called “Present Tense.” In it she speaks of various aspects of life
and living as a sort of tension…the tension between right and wrong. Saying something and not saying
something. Doing this or doing
that. Going here or going there. You get the idea.
In one of those emails some
months ago, Kendra, who lives with her husband and family across the street
from the school where Collin, her husband, teaches, told about an encounter
with a neighbor. Kendra and her family live
in a part of the city where many would prefer to NOT be living. They purposely are living there, not only
because of the proximity to Collin’s work, but in order to live out lives of
faith in a community desperately longing for hope and promise.
I will be quoting her as she
tells the story.
A man was staying in the
vacant home next door to us that his father owns, trying to detox from the hard
drugs he’s addicted to.
One thing I learned during his
stay was that while many ministries in the city offer rehab support for people
trying to get sober, many also require you to be completely detoxed from all
substances—even ones meant to keep you off other drugs—before they can get
support. I read more about detoxing and
was humbled to discover just how brutal it is.
Whatever pleasurable effect a
drug has on the body, quitting that drug has the reverse effect. For example, heroin offers a high mood,
decreased anxiety, and insensitivity to pain. While someone is detoxing from heroin, their
withdraw symptoms will give them a low mood, extreme pain and anxiety.
To put it lightly, this was
horrific for our neighbor. It seemed
like he was either out of his mind from the drugs or out of his mind from the
pain of being off the drugs, and the sound effects went on next door for weeks
and weeks, at all hours.
In the middle of one night, he
was outside making a lot of disruptive noise and other erratic behaviors. We tried to coax him back inside, asking him
to let us take him to a detox facility where he could get more help through the
process. He wasn’t hearing us on
multiple levels, but before he wandered away, he looked at my husband and said:
“Tell me you love me,
Collin.”
I looked at my husband with
wide eyes, shocked by our neighbor’s request. Did this man know what he was
asking for? More importantly, who he was
asking it from? My husband—who’s forever
loyal to his commitments—still shrinks away from I love yous and hugs that
aren’t from his wife and kids.
Collin tried dodging the
request twice; the reasons could be many. But then he looked back at our
neighbor and said, “I love you.”
The next day, our neighbor’s
dad took him to a detox center.
This is Jay again. I told you Kendra’s story to ask you what you
would have done in that situation?
First, would you have placed yourself and your family in a neighborhood
such as that? Second, would you have
tried to help your neighbor in the situation he was in, outside in the middle
of the night disrupting the neighborhood?
And finally, if you would have
answered “Yes,” to the above questions, how would you have responded to your neighbor
wanting you to say that you loved him?
You know, it’s relatively easy to
say, “I love you,” to our spouses, children, and even relatives and close
friends. And it’s relatively easy to
provide some kind of help if called upon.
It’s quite another to truly love,
provide help that makes one get into the dirt and mud along with the other
person, and say as well as demonstrate that you love someone in the throes of incredible
difficulty, sinful living, poor decision-making, and a checkered history.
Life is messy. Sometimes, in order to truly help…in order to
truly be the salt and light that Jesus asked his followers to be, you have to
step into that mess with someone. You
have to get dirty, into the gritty part of that person’s life, in order to help
with the clean-up.
May you not be hesitant to get into someone else's "mess" in order to demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ as you continue to discover what it means to "Love your neighbor as yourself."
Blessings