About 4 years ago at Spring Harvest I went to see a guy called Shane Clairborne speak. What he said, and what he wrote about in his book "The Irresistible Revolution", really clicked with me. I felt like he summed up and expressed and was actually living out what I think Christianity should look like today, what I want my life to look like but am a little bit too attached to money, clothes and I-D magazine to manage. He talks about the bits of the gospels that other people leave out, the bits that challenge and inspire me and frighten me- about giving away what you have, about not being attached to possessions and property, about being counter-cultural, about being anti-war and about loving those that society rejects. It's beautiful stuff. There are stories about caring for people- the homeless, the destitute, the chronically poor, the dying, the unwashed, the addicted- and about how he encounters Jesus in these people and loves them and sees lives changed and people come to know God and live a fuller life.
I've been trying to see what this looks like more and more in my life, not that I'm "there" yet and not that I've got my stuff together- I haven't. But I'm writing this at 4am in the office at work because I am on a night shift and I can't sleep because one of the residents has gone missing- she walked out yesterday, leaving her baby (who she loved SO much), calling up old acquaintances and going out to score drugs. She had been doing so well, three months clean, a beautiful little baby girl and just starting to really engage with a new, hopeful life- she was genuinely one of the best mothers I have ever seen and she had just started going to church and was planning to go to college. But she walked out, abandoning her little one (who has been taken straight in to care)because she couldn't take it and she really, really wanted to use. I am so gutted, I was her key worker and we spent a ot of time together and I really, really cared for her and I prayed for her and I really tried to love her and treat her with compassion and love and respect. Apparently, when she left, she was crying and said that we couldn't have done anything else to help, that we were perfect, that she loved us.
And this is the last straw in a few weeks for me of things going really wrong- a lot of sadness and mistakes and walking away- things going wrong and sleepless nights. My life, my personal life, is pretty a-okay- it's the lives of those I love that are spinning out of control. And I am wondering if when people say "Lord, break my heart for the poor, the lost, the outcasts" they would mean it, if they knew it felt like this- disappointment, anger, hurt, rejection, sadness, despair. Babies left alone, hours and hours of meticulous love and care thrown away, all my energy spent. I know about the success stories, I'm inspired by them and I know they are reality- that hope comes, that people are saved, that addictions are overcome- but what about the heartbreak and the not-yets and the refusals of help and the being shouted at and the hit where it hurts? Please hear that I am not being cynical, I want to spend my life on this, I do, I just want people to be real about it. And I am left here thinking about the editing that goes in to Christian books. Did Mother Teresa ever break down, was the sadness ever too much? Did Shane Clairborne ever have his heartbroken when someone went back to drugs? Does Rob Bell ever invest his life in someone that walks away?
And then somewhere in the back of my mind, I see a man looking over a city and crying for it, because he loved the people that lived there so much and it broke his heart and he would have gathered them together like a mother, safe with him but they walked away (Matthew ch23). And I see a Father waiting at the gates every night, squinting down the road to see if his kid is coming home, waiting with love even though he took all his money and squandered it on bad things, heartbroken but eager for his sons return. And I see myself, throwing everything away, time and time again, and being welcomed home time and time again. And I think I understand a little bit more.....
