I’m in the Highland office now, working at the computer in the community ministry office. Mike Cope is in his office across the hall. I occasionally wonder if he remembers the time in Randy’s and his Bible class when, from the row behind him, I poked his bald spot with a pencil eraser.
I don’t think I’ll bring it up. Two years is a long time.
Six shots rang out Tuesday on a street where children were playing. The target ducked down in her car, which the gunman destroyed with his bullets. Amazingly, no one was hurt.
Maranatha.
Tonight, there were fourteen middle and high school students in my class at Freedom Fellowship.
Good God.
The first night I taught, there was four.
What in God’s name is going on over there?
I led them in a discussion of the problem of pain and suffering in the world, and what we can and should do about it.
God is good.
If the time comes when despair sees violence as the only possible way, it is because Christians were not what they should have been. If violence is unleashed anywhere at all, the Christians are always to blame. This is the criterion, as it were, of the confession of sin. Always, it is because Christians have not been concerned for the poor, have not defended the cause of the poor before the powerful, have not unswervingly fought the fight for justice, that violence breaks out.
-Jacques Ellul
There is a child at Freedom Fellowship Friends who has been the first one there every day our doors have been open. He’s a sweet kid, and probably the smartest one I’ve ever met, but he has an odd habit. He does his homework diligently, and then he starts what his mother calls the “Never-Ending Game of Mercy.”
I don’t know if you’re familiar with “Mercy.” The point is to test the strength and limitations of the person with whom you are competing. You latch hands , with your fingers interlacing with the hands opposite you. You begin pushing and pulling, twisting and turning your arms in an attempt to cause the other person a significant amount of pain. The game is over when someone cries out, “Mercy!”
However, long before he can beat anyone at this game (he’s maybe 4′3″ and weighs 65 lbs soaking wet), it dissolves into a wrestling match. And finally, he wants to be chased.
Chased around the tables. Chased around the parking lot. Chased around our grassy area. Chase. Wrestle. Chase. Wrestle. Chase! This is our routine. Everything he does before leads to the chase.
This fits right into Henri Nouwen, of course. We long to be wanted. Needed. Beloved. Blessed - by the knowledge that the world would be worse off without our presence. This is not arrogance, but merely the knowledge that we were created as good by the Father. Nouwen would say that this chasing game embodies one of the most basic needs of our souls. I remember part of a poem I wrote several years ago:
Playing Hide and Seek
We never stopped to think
That if we hid, you would not find;
That if we ran, you would not chase,
While playing Hide and Seek.
I didn’t always realize that was I was being pursued. I remember feeling left out, alone and wondering who was supposed to be there and why it was that nobody chased me when I went running. Looking back, though, I know that I was pursued recklessly. We all need to be chased.
When I think of the patience that my volunteers have, I realize that they are meeting that need by being Jesus with skin on. And, in this case, “mercy” takes on a whole new meaning.