Last Saturday was a interesting day and that is an understatement. it began with breakfast, meeting my pastor and then some sidewalk art. From there it took an unexpected twist right to the belly of Cookeville's apartments, as I helped a friend move out.
The house she moved out of was a wreck, her room mate had gotten in to drugs and had her boyfriend and some of his friend had all moved in, all of which where deep in drugs. In the middle of this whole mess of broken lives was her room mate’s six year old son, who played with his toys at the top of the stairs while his mom was passed out in the bed room. He was a sweet kid too, helped me move stuff down stairs and picked up stuff I dropped. I wonder how he will manage with the hell going on around him.
We got to the new apartments and found all of the red tape and extortion that was going on behind the beautiful facade of neatly cut hedges and perfectly cut grass. I could not fault the place for any thing bigger than a little greed but the while place was soulless, a huge a machine that gears and cogs ground anything that was out of line in to dust.
We left the high class apartments and drove to the end of a small a neighborhood street, apparently my fiends brother's house. Out side her father worked in silent solitude repairing the siding. In side, two ladies tried to keep order as their children gleefully ran through the house in disregard to the disrepair and gloom that hung in the air since the ladies Husbands had been incarcerated. I did what i could to brighten the place as the ladies pattered. In all their conversation the despair and desperation for release even if it came from the temporary buzz of a bottle.
In all the places I went I did not feel the darkness that I would have expected in such places. You may discount such "feelings" but I have come to respect such promptings from the Holy Spirit which is a subject I will have to leave for another time. The people in these places where not evil or corrupt they were desperately hungry for salvation, for hope and for peace. These were people that had not been reached by the good news.
I did not really comprehend what I had seen that day until I went to church Sunday night. One of the large and more charismatic or "full gospel" churches was having a revival that I was asked to attend. As the mass of people voiced their worship to God all I could hear was a multitude of people weeping. I was then that it all began to unfold as the pastor preached that God would bell those that where faithful to give. I looked around that defiantly the church had been blessed every one was wonderfully dressed in an exquisite state of the art church but this was all just a show and the mere surface of the problem.
We have been given an abundance of blessings in money, power, character talents and spiritual gifts. And the pastor preached that those that have back pain should come forward and be healed. Can God heal them? Yes, why? So we can sit comfortably in our chairs and read our bible and greedily stuff our selves with little books about our purpose in life while people are crying out in every bar and club to know Gods love. Maybe this is why we can’t find our purpose perhaps our churches are dying from spiritual gluttony.
This Is my cry, this is the real world and the world is bleeding on the streets. God did not save us to sing Him songs or be good little girls and boys. He saved us to love him and to be his love to the world. The world is not going to come to the sterile operating table we call the alter, it fights bleeds and dies on the grimy streets, it lays out OD in messy bedrooms, it plays at the top of the stairs, it is taps away inside the corporate machine, it chases kids around a decrepit apartment, it sits in cold jail cell and tips back another beer in the bar. The world is a messy place and it’s time to get messy.
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