Friday during my lunch hour I decided to go for a walk. I packed pb and j - my personal fav. and so my lunch was pretty mobile, and it was a gorgeous day. Right across the street from where I work is an awesome walking path and a pretty neighborhood and some incredible views of the mountains. So it all added up to an easy decision to go for a lunch walk. The neighborhood that I walked through was a really wealthy neighborhood - actually the most expensive homes I've seen in Denver so far. Crazy-money homes. I was thinking "oh, this will be fun to look at the nice homes..." and I expected it to be so. I was kinda surprised at my feeling though as I walked past these houses - these huge, beautiful, scenic houses. I was sad. I was kinda irritated too. The idea of living in one of these houses, in this ridiculously "nice" neighborhood has become so so unappealing to me. I see loneliness and greed and self-centerdness. I see the American dream laid out before to perfection and I'm thinking to myself "isn't it obvious how dumb this is? Isn't it obvious how empty all this stuff and money and isolation leaves people? How has this become what we value and pursue with our lives?"
I think the thing that was interesting to me was that I wasn't just thinking these things with my mind....I was feeling them. I'm grateful though - really thankful that God has given me the gift of being able to see the emptiness and lies represented by something as simple as a huge empty house in suburbia.
And yet while the alternative i think reflects so much more truth and beauty and I really believe is the way God made us to live, it isn't always easy. Living in community in a poorer neighborhood without my own room, sharing each and every meal, learning to give and serve as a primary action over own and take, having people over all the time, never knowing what God will bring that day....it's challenging. sometimes grueling. It is at times like this that the appeal of security and independence and privacy becomes magnetic.
In the Sunday morning House-Church we were discussing 1 Corinthians 4 today. I think part of this chapter is somewhat appropriate.
"For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong, You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things."
What kind of lifestyle produces a description like this? yikes.
