After an hour of discussion and final purchase, the three
of us, Mom, Dad, and me, walked from the store to our little tan Suzuki family
car.
As it happens most times, I knew we were about to be
asked for money by a woman passing by. I
walked quickly past her shoddy car, hoping Dad would unlock our car so I could
avoid the situation altogether. I passed
by. Mom passed by. And Dad was the last.
The car she was in paused, and her voice called out to my
father.
“Sir, ‘scuse me, sir!”
To my surprise, he paused.
It’s not that my father isn’t a generous man, because he
is. When I left him at the age of 21, I
dare say that even living under his roof for those 21 years, I still had no
idea who he really was. So, at 26, when presented
with a situation I had never before seen him in, I, too, paused, and watched
the scene unfold.
Only an hour earlier he had joked with my mom about “having
only $9 in his wallet,” and that “that’s what happens when you get married.” And here, though I couldn’t hear what she
said from the cab of her car, I saw my father open up his wallet and give her
what he had. And further, he called my
mother to him, and asked her for what she had.
As the old car drove away, me still standing behind our
car, I watched as my dad, teary eyed and mood sullen, unlocked the doors, and
lifted himself into the driver’s seat.
“She had nothing, Naomi.”
He bowed his head and spoke to my mom.
She had a car, I
thought evilly. What does he mean she had nothing?
The only thing that stopped the judgment taking place in
my mind was the sound of crying.
I sat, trying to calculate what I was hearing.
My father was weeping.
An older and wiser Jamie might have taken this select
moment to minister to her unsaved parents, but instead I sat quietly, silently,
aghast at my ugly thoughts. Here was a
man so moved we sat in that Verizon parking lot for nearly 10 minutes. We just sat as he cried and talked of a
forsaken humanity.
An unsaved man had just given all he had to a poor woman.
A follower of Christ had run from her. To add insult to injury, I had run from her
after walking away from a store with $500 worth of merchandise.
When we finally drove away, the conviction I felt in my
heart was suffocating.
I don’t know why I am so slow to talk about my financial
burden when I made everything of my OYC so public.
I am hesitant to admit that I am lost financially. That I spend irresponsibly. And not only do I spend recklessly, I spend
money that I don’t even have.
The amount of my consumer debt is nearly equal to what I
make in a year working at the bank. That
is difficult to type, to admit that I have no restraint.
But to deal with a problem, you have to admit you have
one first, right?
I watched another sermon of Andy Stanley’s tonight—one aimed
toward the financially lost. He spoke of
the parable of the shrewd manager in Luke, and shared:
For the people of this world
are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.
It was scripture that hit me square in the face
tonight. And he continued:
Jesus is looking at these
religious people, these are people that believe there's a Heaven, most of them,
they believe there's an eternity, they believe that this life is not all there
is. And he makes a comment, he says do
you realize that people of this world, the people that think what you see is
what you get, this is all there is, the people that think this life is all
there is to life, the people that don't think in terms of eternity, the people
that don't make decisions in light of Heaven, the people that don't really
think about the world to come, the people that just think about this world, he
said they are way more shrewd, they are WAY MORE SHREWD, than those of you, he
would say to his audience and to us, than those of you that actually believe there's
a heaven, those of you who actually believe there's an eternity, those of you
that actually believe that everybody lives forever somewhere…because they know
how to take a little bit of time, and a little bit of opportunity and leverage
it so that their time on this earth and the future is good time, is taken care
of time, is prosperous time. They know how to leverage the little bit now for
the future here.
I didn’t care about that woman’s future. Earthly or otherwise. What have I done within the last year to love
“the least of these” and to shine light upon their lives?
The perspective of eternity is not guiding my hand.
Slowly, I’m painfully coming to terms with what in my
life has Kingdom impact and what doesn’t.
Last year was the OYC that afforded me freedom from
relational dependence. This year I feel
as if God has devised the breaking of another idol, and it seems this will be
even more painful than the first. Where last year I fought against the womanly bondage of dating and dependence, this is a larger tyrant. Consumerism is a broader struggle, touching all in the American culture.
Counter-cultural, this is absolutely what it means to follow Jesus. Where there is great pain, great struggle, there is opportunity for a great overcome. God, help me through this and understand what it means to live differently, with contentment, against the grain.
