Last Saturday I found myself at the Borders Book Store in Lincoln Village. It is one of the 200 stores that are closing this spring because of bankruptcy. The signs in their windows lured me in by saying that everything must go and that I could expect 20-40% off of my purchase. I couldn’t resist even though I have several dozen newly purchased books on my shelf that have yet to be read.
I made my way through the crowds of sale scavengers to the cook books, the best sellers, and then to the cheap books section. This section had already been well rummaged through, but I found a great book on North American birds which I just had to have. There was also one entitled The Garden Flower Book and because last week felt like spring I couldn’t resist the temptation of adding it to my collection.
When I go to a book store I rarely go there with a specific mission. I go there for the joy of finding books I didn’t know I needed, reading chapters of books which if read in their entirety would bore me to death, and I go there to read titles. I love to travel down a row and read the spines of books and let their titles carry my brain in all sorts of fanciful and thoughtful directions.
Known and Unknown, Heaven is for Real, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, In the Blink of an Eye, The Inner Circle, Committed: A Love Story, and Three Cups of Tea. Just sitting with any one of these titles and meditating on their meaning can change the direction of my day. Last Saturday the book title that caught by attention was, Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You. It’s the story of a man who is a victim of the recession and who is pink slipped after 18 years on the job. The author’s writing isn’t phenomenal, but the title of the book can have a phenomenal impact if you meditate upon it even for a moment.
Nothing happens until it happens to you. This is the truth of how most of us navigate our lives. Until something directly affects us it’s as if that something doesn’t even exist. If we still have our jobs, the recession isn’t that bad. If we have healthcare benefits, we feel free to vote against laws that extend it to others. If we can turn on the faucet and find water, we feel free to use as much of it as we want without concerning ourselves with the fact that many have just enough to keep them alive. If we have never found ourselves in a particular bind, we have all the answers for how someone should have extracted themselves from theirs. If we have not had the Bible used against us, we don’t think about the consequences of how we use it against others. And if we have the privilege of a particular race, culture and class, we expect others to simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps in the same ways that we did.
Until it happens to us... and then we can’t believe that people aren’t willing to pay higher taxes on our behalf and we are aware of every ounce wasted that could have been offered to us. Until it happens to us....and then we understand that there is no easy way out of some situations and that hearing the right chapter and verse is not always helpful. Until it happens to us...and we find that we there are systems in place that cannot be conquered alone and that it’s difficult to pull oneself up by the bootstraps when you had to sell your boots so that your kids could eat.
“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Cor 12:26)
So much of what we hear from so much of the church is that “it’s just between you and Jesus.” This foolish preaching has just got to stop. We can no longer make a commitment to follow Jesus with every head bowed and every eye closed. We need to make a decision to follow Jesus with our eyes open to the world around us and Jesus’ love for others within us. There is really no getting around the fact that as followers of Jesus Christ we are called to invest ourselves in righting the wrongs that affect those around us even if those wrongs never directly affect us.
I invite you to invest yourself in understanding one issue that has no direct connection to you, to work towards alleviating a wrong that has never wronged you and to consider that there are things happening to others that deserve your advocacy and investment even if they never happen to you.
