sufficient

same kind of different as me

After compiling my summer reading list, I realized that a lot of it was pretty heavy, not the stuff of beach reading, and after finishing When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor... or Yourself, I wanted something on the light side. I picked up same kind of different as me knowing nothing about it other than its subtitle, "a modern-day slave, an international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together." OK, maybe not light reading, but I hoped it would quickly engage me. It has, and so far it has been particularly thought-provoking on the heels of When Helping Hurts and a sermon tonight on Ephesians 6, "slaves obey your masters." More on that later when I've had time to process through some things.

For now, a few appealing snippets from the book, which is written in chapters alternating between the "modern-day slave" and "international art dealer" (well, one is a whole [short] chapter).

[12] "As newlyweds, Deborah and I were just your basic Sunday-go-to-meeting Methodists. We parked ourselves in the pews most Sundays, and definitely every Easter and Christmas, since in those days it was still the widely held opinion that only hell-bound heathens- and possibly lawyers- skipped church on Easter and Christmas. We kept up that pattern until 1973 when some friends from a Bible church invited us to their home for a six-week "discussion group" about life.

"As it turned out, we had actually been labeled "lost," "nonbelieving," and "unsaved," possibly because we had no fish stickers on our cars. (Which reminds me of one friend who, though newly "born again," retained the bad habit of flipping off other drivers while barreling down the road in her Suburban. Even with her newfound religion, she could not control her middle finger, but according to her husband, the Holy Ghost prompted her to scrape the fish of her bumper until her finger got saved.)

"Unsuspecting, my wife and I joined the discussion group at the Williamsburg-style home of Dan and Patt McCoy. Dan was an ex-TCU football player who was six-foot-five and 275 pounds, so when he invited us to his house, I was afraid not to say yes. That first Sunday night, we were surprised to find exactly forty people- twenty couples, we found out later, divided equally into "saved" and "saved nots." Patt had set out an attractive buffet- brownies, lemon bars, coffee, and iced tea- but strangely, no one so much as grazed. I've since deduced that it's always a trap when you don't get to eat until after you hear the talk.

"We introduced ourselves around and listened for an hour while a fresh-scrubbed, close-cropped man named Kirby Coleman addressed the whole group on the burning questions of existence: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What happens when we die? Quite frankly, I thought Kirby looked too young to know any of the answers.

"After the group talk, he tracked us down at the buffet table. "Are you a Christian?" he asked Deborah.

"He may as well have asked her if she was a human being. "I was born a Christian," she replied, insulted beyond belief.

"But are you saved?" he pressed. "Are you certain you're going to heaven?"

"Deborah put one hand on her hip and pointed the other one at in Kirby's face. "Well!" she said. "My daddy paved the parking lot at the Snyder Methodist Church, and that's good enough for me!"

"Deborah Hall had had just about enough of Mr. Kirby Coleman- so much that we went back to tussle with him again the next week. And the next. And the next. Each Sunday evening, the discussion funnel narrowed further, from general philosophizing about life to pointed evangelization. After five weeks, I had it figured out: If you hadn't accepted Jesus by the sixth Sunday, you were probably going to hell on Monday. So, on the last night after we went home, I told Deborah I was going to pray the sinner's prayer Kirby had told us about.

"I don't see the point," she said. "How could I have lived this long, been in church all my life, and still have to do that? It doesn't make any sense. Besides, it just seems too easy."

"So I prayed without her, asking God to forgive my sins in the name of His Son, Jesus. Deborah, however, cross-examined the gospel like a prosecutor on a federal case. And it was eventually the lawyerly arguments in books by C.S. Lewis and Josh McDowell that convinced her Christianity could stand up to her intellectual rigor. Finally, she prayed the prayer, too.

"That's how the Jesus wave that swept across college campuses in the 1960s caught us in the suburbs before it slipped out to sea. I guess we were pretty good at the whole Christian thing- or maybe we were bad at it- because we managed to alienate many of our old college friends. With our new spiritual eyes, we would see they didn't have fish stickers either, and we set about saving them from eternal damnation with all the subtlety of rookie linebackers. Looking back now, I mourn the mutual wounds inflicted in verbal battles with the "unsaved." In fact, I have chosen to delete that particular term from my vocabulary as I have learned that even with my $500 European-designer bifocals, I cannot see into a person's heart to know his spiritual condition. All I can do is tell the jagged tale of my own spiritual journey and declare that my life has been the better for having followed Christ."

And a little later on...

"With the museums, the restaurants, and the malls, I was showing Denver a different way to live, a side of life in which people took time to appreciate fine things, where they talked about ideas, where raw yellowtail cost more than cooked catfish. But he remained resolutely convinced that his way of life was no worse than mine, only different, pointing out in the process certain inconsistencies: Why, he wondered, did rich people call it sushi while poor people called it bait?"

posted by CP @ 11:37 PM 0 thoughts