Up to the Challenge?

We have a programme at our church called "Angel Food." Whenever someone in the church or the close relatives of people in the church go through a major event - surgery, a death, illness, the birth of a baby, a significant move - a team of people make a large meal that is delivered to the house. It's a main dish, homemade bread, a salad and some kind of dessert, usually. We have only been recipients of Angel Food once, when Pk was born, and it was a wonderful thing. There's nothing like a wonderful home-cooked meal when life is chaotic and it helps to know that there is help out there. I have been a cook for Angel Food for a while.

This week, I got an email mid-week asking me to do something to contribute to Angel Food and it needed to be more substantial than usual because the family in question is quite large. As you know, this has been a crazy week, so it panicked me a bit in terms of getting something done. Luckily, I got the salad to do and it wasn't quite as challenging as a large main dish would have been. I found myself feeling just the tiniest bit resentful of the intrusion.

As I was making the salad today, I got pondering WHY I was feeling so resentful and it came to me and it wasn't something I was proud of. Normally, I just jump in, getting that good feeling I get when helping (see the previous post!). This time, I just didn't feel the same drive. The reason - my feelings of disapproval of the situation in question. I don't want to say to much because I don't want to violate someone's privacy but it is enough to say that it is a challenging situation, a situation that arises from choices that I would NOT make and it brings out the judge in me.

It's interesting the way that God tests us. Dh and I both grew up in very diverse churches. Dh's family are staunch Salvationist (members of the Salvation Army) and you won't find a church more committed to life's lost and suffering than they are. For other reasons, it is not the church for us but we both admire and Dh absorbed that idea that church is a place for ALL people and that to be in a place of only "people like us" really isn't the challenge that church is meant to be. Of course, with my hippie-peacenik-social justice-children of the 60's parents, church was always somewhere in the inner-city among people who KNOW struggle.

When we moved up here, Dh and I found it really hard to find a church. We went to a church for a while in a town not too far from here. The minister really had a heart for everyone and while the congregation was awfully white-middle-class, the preaching from the pulpit was challenging enough that we felt it was worth the drive. We never really felt a sense of belonging there and when the congregation turned on the minister, we quickly realised that our faith was being hindered and not helped in that environment so we decided to move on. Our second stop was a church in the nearest large town to us. We went for a couple of months but it just didn't fit with our perceptions of church. There were no small groups, people were much too comfortable and for us, with no children at the time, it felt like the church really didn't know what to do with us. It felt to us like a church that existed to give people a place to send their children to Sunday school. That was NOT was we were looking for.

Then, through a series of coincidences, we ended up at our current church. It's in another town not to far from here but this town is in an area known to be struggling. Really, it is a town in transition. Fifteen years ago, it was a hotbed of social issues - all the wonderful trappings of poverty and few resources. In recent years, it has become a commuter town, largely, populated by young families and people who want that suburban lifestyle but just don't have the money to afford the popular places to be. The cost of living is lower but it is reasonably close to larger places for shopping and the homes are brand new, nice (if you like new homes) and affordable. We went to church there the first Sunday and at the end of the service, Dh turned to me and said, "We're home" and I had to agree.

It's a very mixed place. There are quite a few people there who are "like us" - white, middle class professionals but who for different reasons, can't afford or choose not to live in the more prominent suburbs (in our case, primarily because of Dh's huge student loans which took us a long time to pay off). On the other hand, there is a little bit of everything else, too - single-parent families, elderly couples, long-time residents of the community who don't have much more (or many teeth, in some cases). We love it there and feel a sense of belonging there that I don't feel in many places. We have friends we would not otherwise have met and have some very close relationships with people who are very much "not people like us". We love it.

At times, though, being a Christian in such a place is a challenge. I try not to but I do have some prejudices and there are ways that certain families choose to do things that really rub me the wrong way. I wish I could say that my issues are with the fact that they are making decisions and choosing lifestyles that go against scriptural teachings about marriage and family. Sadly, while I may not think that their decisions are Christian, if I am totally honest, it is much more shallow than that. People "like us" don't do things like that. "We" don't have more children than we can afford. "We" don't have babies until we are married or until we know that we have a way to make a living. "We" get educations and drive inexpensive cars that we can afford. "We" parent in certain ways. "We" are careful about the life partners we choose and generally also go for people "like us." I let it somehow become an "us" and "them" and, in my mind, my way of doing things is somehow more right than theirs and that gives me a feeling of slight superiority.

Could that be any less Christian? I struggle with the whole "love the sinner, hate the sin" idea. I do find it hard, sometimes, to be compassionate and to truly and deeply love people who make choices different than mine. I am not saying that I am any worse than anyone else - if we are honest, we all do it at different times. I just find it interesting that God could use a salad to teach me an important lesson and it is proof to me that we are in exactly the church we are meant to be. God is challenging me, not just through the preaching or the Bible study but through the relationships, which is just how it should be. I have a long way to go but I will tell you, this salad is going to get more attention and prayer over it than any other I have contributed.