Coming back home is always a challenge.

Sure, this is the place that’s familiar to me, and I don’t need to worry about not knowing people or whatever.  But on the other hand, there’s an incredible temptation to get comfortable and complacent, to tell myself that I deserve a break and let everything that God’s challenged me about fall to the side.  There’s almost a destruction of a will to seek God.  I prayed today that God would humble me, to direct my focus on His purpose and not mine.  Sometimes I wish He didn’t answer prayer the way He does.

So a friend and I were planning to head to Atlanta tomorrow.  We planned this yesterday, and were getting all the details worked out.  Our goal was to go to a ministry called Seven Bridges, where we first got introduced to homeless ministry, which in turn completely wrecked my life for the better.  Our plan was to drive down Friday, hang out with some Atlanta people, do homeless ministry Saturday, and church then heading home on Sunday.  We got a driver lined up, and everything was in perfect order.  I was pretty psyched about doing this, because it involves some of my favorite things in the world: homeless ministry and cool people. 

Then, just a few hours ago, my friend’s parents forbade him from going.  Just like that.  Our entire trip scrapped in the matter of 5 minutes.

I was pretty indignant and disappointed at first.  I’d spent a lot of time investing in this trip, telling people we were going and figuring out what we would do.  Yet after the moment passed by, I realized how little I had factored God into this equation.  I hadn’t really prayed about it, and it wasn’t like I had placed this before God at all.  It was all my own desire to go, my own planning, my own hammering out the logistics.  Where was submitting oneself before God, recognizing that all that is done is to be done for His glory?  When we pray that what we do is for His glory, are we willing to accept that maybe He will be most glorified when what we want to happen doesn’t happen?

There will be times when God’s answer to prayer is a winged chariot, so to speak, where everything works out more beautifully than we can imagine.  We take those times to humble ourselves in awe of somebody much greater than we are.

There will be times when God’s answer to prayer is a huge wrench in our plans, when our best laid plans, though “for God”, are laid to waste despite our most meticulous efforts.  We take those times to humble ourselves before God, confessing our own pride and ambition.

*

Oh God, please forgive me for pushing my own agenda while I was pretending to push Yours.

There’s something refreshingly different about doing homeless ministry on saturday, to get my mind completely off school and all the things I think/know I need to do, and just put oneself out there to love others.  Serving the people is amazing, but sometimes even more amazing is the people.  Especially today.

On the streets, we end up meeting a lot of people that are in rough spots in life, either having spent time in prison, struggling with addictions, and many things I could never dream of.  And this is where it’s so difficult for some of us college students to minister to them on a deeper level, because fundamentally we have no idea what they’re going through.  In addition to the four college students going downtown today, a guy came along who used to be addicted to heroin, and is very open about it.  And for some reason today, we met quite a few people who were willing to open up about their struggles with similar things.  This guy connected with them much more than we ever could, and at the end of the day all of us told him how cool it was that he could relate to these people on the street, to give them advice and have them know that some people had gone through the same thing.  He responded by saying, “No, no.  I’m just a vessel.”

As I was walking back with somebody in our group, we were talking about what she could do about this homeless lady whom we talked to near where we were living.  She was one of the very few homeless women on the streets, and as we walked up we could see the tears in her eyes.  My friend really wanted to do something for this woman, to invite her over to her house or anything that would make her life better.  We discussed what it meant to love others as Jesus did, but still be wise about it.  Showing love requires thinking about it, to not let yourself get carried away by pure emotion and see where you fit into what God’s doing.  As we parted ways, she thanked me quite a bit for reminding her about having wisdom.  As usual, I acknowledged it but didn’t say anything.  I thanked her for her compassion and hospitality.  ”It’s all from God, not me.” she replied as she headed back to her place.

Today, I have seen glimpses of what it means to be humble, to not even have to consider where your words or abilities or experiences come from but realize that it’s all from God and it’s all for serving His kingdom.  It’s something I sorely lack in myself, for at times, or rather most of the time, I find myself serving or doing good things with this background motive of trying to meet the spiritual expectations placed on me rather than truly giving selflessly to something bigger than myself.  These two people that were with us at homeless ministry today, however, showed what it meant to be humble, to deeply believe that all one has is from God.  It’s one thing to know that intellectually, but to place this before the Creator and let Him take all that you have is a scary thing.  I don’t know if I can do that.

Many times I’ve sat around and wondered if expressing my thoughts out loud would do amount to anything of significance.  And when I do feel like writing anything, by the time I sit down, I write it out and it sounds so bad that I just gave up after a while.

But here’s to an experiement in blogging.  Maybe this time, I won’t worry about how this sounds, because unless you’re pretty keen, you don’t know who I am.  Futility?  Maybe.  But I can deal with that.

*

It’s tough to keep things in perspective.  Today was one of those days when I was reminded why spending saturday at homeless ministry was worth it.  I didn’t really want to go at first, with all this work building up and thinking that the whole process isn’t very efficient, where we waste so much time sitting around waiting for people to come.  But I went anyway, and once again had my heart and mind humbled.  We met three men, Merril, Wink and Rick, who were in the woods building a shelter for Rick.  As we went up to talk to them, I could tell they were pretty suspicious at first, and I’ve got to admit that more than once I was thinking that it was about time to get out of there.  But we stayed and ended up talking to them, and before long they were enthusiastically describing how they were building this new shetler for Rick, and how somebody’s who’s not a Steelers fan has no place being in Pittsburgh.  It’s too easy to get jaded and think that we’re too good for the people around us, that just because we have a home and money and security, that others that God loves just as much as we do aren’t worth talking to or spending time with.  Jesus didn’t tell us to feed the hungry or love the lonely because we’re so great and are in a position to be a provider, but because we’re just like them in God’s eyes.  There’s something jarring about realizing that when you’re looking into the face of a homeless man who’s trying to hide a bottle of alcophol from you, but if you really do agree with the way that God sees you, you’ll realize that He sees you as equal to this man right in front of you.

And this is one of the reasons why I believe that following Jesus is worth it and meaningful.  Just because I was born into a good family with good opportunity doesn’t mean I should be inherently worth more than somebody who’s been through some rough patches in life and doesn’t have a place to live.  Christianity strikes me as being a faith that rejects the idea that a person is worth more because of all that he has or has accomplished, and instead we are all sinners in front of a perfect God.  Sincere humility is inherently more attractive than overbearing egotism, and living out a faith like this will naturally produce the former.  Why not strive to live a life that produces that which is most beautiful?