Getting our hands dirty
My dad and my older daughter Sophia spend a lot of time together. I suspect that they will spend even more time together now that my mom has died. Sophia has numerous special needs and intellectual limitations, but those limitations have not in any way limited her ability to express her love. Sophia loves her grandpa very very much and I know that my dad loves Sophia. Sophia loves to sit on the couch with Grandpa and put things on his head. She has a collection of stuffed animals at his house that work well for this activity, but magazines or really anything Sophia can find works just as well for her. Sophia thinks it is so funny every time she puts something on dad’s head and my dad likes to hear Sophia laugh so he is a good sport about it. Dad and Sophia will often go for walks together as well. If you are driving in Lake Land Or on a weekday afternoon you might see them. They have several different routes that they take. They usually carry a couple of plastic bags with them so that they can pick up the trash on the side of the road as they walk, trying to keep the neighborhood clean. The truth, however, is that Sophia doesn’t really pick up any trash. Sophia is what I call the “neighborhood trash identifier.” Sophia points out the trash she sees in the ditch and then dad is the one who has to go pick it up. Sophia doesn’t like to get her hands dirty and so trash pickup can be tricky for her. It makes me laugh every time I see her pointing for dad to go get another can from the ditch. We are working with Sophia to try and have her not only identify the trash, but to then follow through and do the next step and actually pick it up and get the trash where it belongs. This whole situation made me think of the commercial on TV you may have seen. The bank is being robbed and the bank security person explains that he really is just a “security monitor,” and that he doesn’t actually do anything other than to notify people that the bank is being robbed. He is not getting involved, not getting his hands dirty.
For too many Christians it seems that this can also be the way we approach our life of faith. We identify ourselves or our family as Christian, but we don’t want to risk getting our hands dirty. We struggle to follow through, be it in coming to worship, or in the ways we serve others for Jesus. We could teach Sunday school, but we choose not to. We don’t want to sacrifice our time or our own convenience. We can’t find time to attend a class or to read scripture or to pray. I often think of the ways in which I call or identify myself as a disciple of Jesus, but then fail to act accordingly. I struggle at times to actually do the things that disciples of Jesus are called to do, worship, pray, study, serve, give, sacrifice. Too often, like my daughter Sophia, I’m real good at being a “neighborhood disciple identifier,” but the hard part comes when it means getting my own hands dirty for Jesus. Just like we’re working with Sophia to not just identify the trash on the road, but to actually reach down and pick it up, I’m going to work on my life of faith this fall and work to get it in the right place too.
