I decided to start a new blog. Last night I went back and read my blog from my Guatemala internship and I got inspired to start up again. Life is full of things that are worth writing down, but they usually are not written down and then they just get forgotten.
Like last Saturday. I went to En Cristo, which is a Whitworth ministry on Saturday afternoons for homeless and low-income people who live in downtown Spokane. A group of about 15 to 20 students goes downtown to visit and share a meal with people in a low-income apartment building and people on the streets. I hadn't been there for a long time but my friend Kelsey wanted to go so I went. I was assigned to be on a street team with two other people, and our group went to the bus plaza. We hadn't been there very long when we saw three homeless men sitting on some benches reading the Bible together. We started talking to them about the Bible--with all their free time they get a lot of opportunity to just sit and read 15-20 chapters a day. I started talking to Robert, who clearly knew his Bible very well and was really excited about his faith in God. He told me the story of the rich young ruler who asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life. He had done everything right, followed all the rules, knew the law perfectly. Maybe today he would have gone to a Christian college, been involved in Bible studies, made lunches for homeless people, and gone on mission trips to Guatemala. A good Christian. But he missed the point. He didn't know the love of God, loved something else more than God. Hm...
I stood there listening to the gospel coming out of the mouth of someone whose earthly posessions added up to nothing but the backpack at his feet. Maybe God wanted to show me something. God dwells among the least, the last, and the lost. His grace is like water, pouring down from above and pooling up in all the lowest places. I think Robert understands the truth of the gospel in a way that I do not. There is something really backwards in our mentality that we, the rich young rulers, need to "bring" the kingdom of God to the poor. No, we, the rich young rulers, need to go see that God dwells in the lowest places already. We need to throw away all the security that we put in our "good deeds" and our theological knowledge, and just be filled and awed with God's amazing grace which we are in desperate need of.