A world away...

I have lived a world away for some time now, like many of us have. We fear the influence of a world that does not claim to know our God, a world that does not live through the same filters that we do. I have feared this world, a world that is different than me, a world that is weird to me, a world that I have all too often declared as wrong or bad or evil. So to this evil world I have pointed my finger, declared their lack of value and then ran away to my own little world. Ran away to a little subculture, a place that plays and lives by my rules, my filters, my ideas of good and beauty. Then, when someone in my world doesn’t play my way, I kick them out. I shun them.

This is how I have lived in the past, but this is not how we were meant to live. This is not how God designed us to live. The “other” world, that bad one, is not all bad. Yes, there are some bad things, and evil is very real, but there is also great good, even good that may not put itself in the “Christian” camp. We often allow the bad we find to dismiss the good that is still there. Do you want to know why I believe there is great good in the world? Because God created it, and he declared it good. The people in it are not all bad either. Why? Because God created them and declared them good.

Good. Not evil, weird, or wrong, but good.

God declared them good. I declared them bad.

Although the expression of the image of God, the goodness of God from creation, is marred by the effects of living in a world that has been broken by sin, it still resides in each of our hearts. God’s beauty and goodness still rest in them. I may have to push past some sinful expressions before finding it, but the good is still there.

God runs to them. I ran from them.

God longs to know them. I have tried to ignore and marginalize them.

Yesterday when my brother-in-law and I where running some errands together, he shared how he was frustrated with a friend who told him that “if someone was not interested or willing to be a Christian then he did not want to waste his time to know them or be around them.” What a horrible thing to say! That type of language makes be deeply angry. Words like that are what drive culture to declare Christians as bigots, judgmental, and a long list of other things that we’re anti-.

That type of language drives our worlds apart. It drives the Kingdom apart.

God declared that he would return and restore his kingdom on this earth—not my make-believe, safety-bubble world, but this one.

I’m trying to move out of the “Christian” world into God’s world, and as I do I realized that what I believed to be the Christian world was really just a part of the rest of the world the whole time, that in reality it’s all God’s world.

So, as we move from 2007 into 2008, may our use of categories to divide, sacred and secular, holy and evil, Christian and non disappear. May we live in this world, in today, and may those of us who have experienced grace, redemption, peace, truth, forgiveness, love and all the other “good” things of God quit running to our subcultures. May we embrace our neighbors. May the Kingdom of God that we have the privilege of ushering in be brought closer not only to the hurting, the wondering, the ones looking for God, but also to the those who are not interested in God, who could care less, to those who are haters of God because even if they do not desire to know him, he desires to know them and they, because they carry the image of God, deserve to see the Kingdom of God here on earth.

Maybe if the world around me could see the good that I am for, instead of the bad that I’m scared of or against, maybe then they would want to hear about the kingdom to which I belong.