Day 69
I see…
The first Porpoise I ever saw was at sea, not in some man-made aquarium. The experts say that Porpoises spend the vast majority of their lives beneath the surface, where man cannot see them.[i]
Take a moment and think about the things that exist that you are absolutely certain of. Now, make a list of five things you’ve heard about that you’re doubtful about their actual existence. (Let me give you some help here…UFO’s, life on other planets, the Lochness monster, a Sasquatch and the abominable snowman). What’s the difference between the two lists? Typically, the existence of things we’re certain of we’ve seen. The stuff on the other list is comprised of things we might have seen pictures, videos or movies of, but haven’t actually seen with our own eyes.
Every Saturday night they came in late, wore hooded sweatshirts (hoods up), sat in the very back of the room, typically looking down at the floor. They would whisper cryptic comments to one another and snicker nervously amongst themselves. They really didn’t want to be here with the rest of the other young adults, at least for any constructive reason. Frankly, there was nothing better to do on Saturday nights and we always ended our get together with food and soda pop. Plus, they had cool reputations to maintain. Those are the real reasons they showed up.
My wife and I referred to Andrew, Louie, Matt and Jack as “our hoodies.” They lived in the barrio where Christians had evangelized their neighborhood since they were infants. Now, here we were, conducting yet another youth group in their neighborhood. These guys (and most of the young adults we hung with) had heard it all. They had been bombarded by the Gospel in every flavor imaginable. Yet, these guys (and most of their friends) remained disillusioned the notion of God and Christians. Why?
What they had seen with their own eyes were droves of people who claimed the name of Christ (primarily Caucasians) who were tutors, teachers, evangelists and social workers in their community. On one occasion, I was in the neighborhood with these four guys as two trucks for an upcoming regional crusade by a famous evangelist pulled up and parked in the middle of the street that divided the two-story apartment buildings on both sides. We stood there together for the next half hour watching the chaos as hundreds of people lined up to cart off boxes of food that were being distributed from the back of the trucks. The residents would run boxes up to their apartment and then run back down to get another armload. After a while the folks unloading the trucks just started tossing boxes off the truck into the crowd (the sheer weight of the Spanish New Testaments flying through the air inside the boxes could have knocked you silly). Finally, the trucks zipped off empty. I took the four guys and went to the movies.
It’s times like these that you get a glimpse beneath the surface of Christianity in action. It’s kind of like snorkeling in the Bahamas. You never obtain an appreciation for the amount of life under the surface until you intentionally place your face beneath the surface and open your eyes. As one author says, “Our modern preoccupation with producing and consuming leads us to live on the surface level of reality and to seek our satisfaction in the finite. But the sacred is known in the depths of reality, not in the manipulation and consumption of the surface.” [ii]
Over the next few years, my wife and I dedicated ourselves to being open for business to the young adults in this neighborhood. We freely gave of ourselves, and whatever we had, to them and their families. Our hoodies, Andrew, Louie, Matt and Jack lost their hoods. A few graduated from high school, learned to drive, landed jobs and went onto college. We learned to laugh together, to cry together, and ask for help and advice from one another. We learned to grow up together. We became able to admit our faults and mistakes to one another. We began to risk a way of relating to one another by moving beyond the hoods we all wear, beneath the surface of daily life.
I lost my real job. We had to start spending our savings to stay afloat financially, while looking for a new job. During this period of time in our life, our friends brought us food, while a couple dozen young adults from an impoverished neighborhood in Santa Ana, CA taught us that, “It’s easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you, try to share some of their poverty and see if you accept it as God’s will yourself!” [iii]
One afternoon as my wife and I had just finished a reality check of the bleakness of our financial situation, the phone rang. It was the hoodies. They wanted us to come over and pick them up along with a group of their friends and “go do something.” I meekly told them that we were flat out of money and really didn’t feel like doing much of anything. We hung up and I told my wife what they said. Two minutes later, the phone rang again. “Hey Bill! You don’t need any money to have fun. We’ve got a soccer ball. Let’s go to the park and hang out.”
Later that afternoon, as I sat with my wife watching these kids play soccer, I heard myself say aloud, “I see.” It wasn’t money or resources these kids came to appreciate from us, it was relationship with us. It was the time we spent together that provided us with the courage to experience a friendship with dimensions far greater than what may appear to those focused solely on the surface. As one author succinctly points out, “Funny, the seven last words of a dying church — “We’ve never done it that way before” — may well end up on the tombstone of the church growth movement and the evangelical community if we do not adopt new standards for seeking growth. It is time to begin. Growing into a community of depth and character is the challenge facing the church of the new millennium.”[iv]
As I listen to the people around me today, I hear them utter phrases like “I can’t seem to find the time, maybe next year, I don’t know where the time went, maybe next time around, there’s just not enough hours in the day,” etc. If it is true that time is truly our most precious asset today in the West, isn’t our time the first fruits that we should be dedicating to Him? Shouldn’t time be the basis for our tithing and our budgets? Perhaps we should consider moving from budgeting based upon tithing dollars to budgets based upon tithing our hearts…our time. I’ll call it timething.
Here’s how it works. Since time is our most precious asset in the West, it is distinctly our first fruits. Imagine what impact Christians could have on the communities within which our churches reside, if we moved from tithing dollars to tithing our time.
The point here is not about “how to get the laity involved in the ministry of the church, but how to get the church involved in the ministry of the laity.”[v] How’s that going to happen? Notice that the only difference between the spelling of tithing and timething is ‘me.’ If we continue to give our churches our money as our tithe, the Church in the West will continue to be destinations where church is performed. If we change our first fruits to our time, only heaven knows what God might do with a groundswell of willing hearts. Perhaps, you will experience the joy of becoming one who can proclaim, “I see.”
NOTES
[i] Read, Andrew Porpoises Voyageur Press, Inc. Vancouver, B.C. Canada © 1999 by Andrew Read, p. 14
[ii] Borg, Marcus J. The God We Never Knew – Beyond Dogmatic Religion to A More Authentic Faith, HarperSanFrancisco-A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Copyright © 1997 by Marcus J. Borg, p.113.
[iii] Merton, Thomas. Seeds, SHAMBHALA, Boston © Copyright 2002 by Robert Inchauti, p. 105.
[iv] Chadwick, William Stealing Sheep – The Church’s Hidden Problems With Transfer Growth, InterVaristy Press, Downers Grove, IL Copyright 2001 by William H. Chadwick. P 169.
[v] Slocum, Robert Maximize Your Ministry, Navpress, Colorado Springs, CO Copyright 1990 by Robert Slocum, p. 170.
