January 2011

Ten hours of travel and we were back in the very place we left.  The little airport in the mountains was too foggy to land and so the planned ministry had to be left to another day.  Two attempts into the small landing strip in the big jet was enough for the pilot.  The stewardess held up her thumb and index finger inches apart.  “This is how much space a little plane needs to land,” she said.  Holding both hands several feet apart she said, “This is how much space we need.”  Disappointed?  Yes, but she made her point.

Sputtering smoke, rickshaws, motorbikes and people, people, people...

The fog of the mountains were traded for the smog of Calcutta.  Tickets canceled, we found a taxi to head back through the mass of sputtering smoke, rickshaws, motorbikes and people, people, people, everyone moving at breakneck speed in the dark.

And then it happened.    Our taxi was three abreast on a two lane road.  The women and children were all ahead on the right.  They were laborers, tribal women and children who carried long poles used for scaffolding on their heads.  Like deer on the the side of the road one moved into the traffic, hesitated and ran.  The others followed, some trying to make it across, some stopped, others (thankfully the children) ran back before the traffic came on them.  Our cabbie was going slow and was able to stop but the motorbike next to us clipped a young girl and I caught her out of the corner of my eye lying in the road, her load scattered about, the driver staring at her; it was her face that took my breath away.  Terrified by the shock, pained, aghast, she screamed at him and got up only to collapse again as soon as she was off the street.

We never stopped.  Within seconds our taxi sped forward without a care in the world.  All of this in 10 seconds, mind you.  Ten seconds that I cannot get out of my mind.  We would have been arrested in the U.S.  We would have been vilified for not stopping to render aid.  Excuse the cliche, life really is less than cheap here especially the lives of the less… Dalits, tribals, homeless, women, slum dogs.  They go by different names but they are so devalued no one really calls them anything.

Before you feel better about our own country, estimates run as high as 10 million African’s that were enslaved in the America’s.  That number pales in the light of the 46 million infants killed by abortion since 1973.  From 1890 to 1910, child slavery in textile and coal mines increased to 2 million. Our own sins have bloodied our hands and once your hands are bloody there is no use in pointing fingers at other’s whose sins are supposedly worse.

What is the problem?  How is it possible that we devalue life yet love our own selves so much?  The set up has been the same since the first sin, by the way.  Man chooses for himself.  Left in privacy, my choice is first to satisfy my own need. You cannot throw money at the problem.  You cannot upend thousands of years of caste or slavery.  You cannot flagellate your own conscience to mollify your guilty soul.

But this you can do.  You can love Jesus more.  And by that alone, your heart will change.  How?  John said this…

We love, because He first loved us.

Love is a funny thing, isn’t it?  Try to explain the undying love of a parent for a wayward child or a wife for a husband or a silly teenage crush, it simply defies our rationale.  But when you heighten the bar to a holy God who unabashedly loves beyond our comprehension… well, it cannot be explained.  It can only be felt through the words of the Lover of your soul.  Hosea recorded God’s words…

My heart is turned over within Me, all My compassions are kindled.
For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst
and I will not come in wrath.

All my compassions are kindled…I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst… We love because He first loved us. The only hope we have to change our ways is to first accept this fact.  I can do nothing to make God love me.  I can do nothing to earn His affection.  He chooses to love me despite my bloody hands, calloused heart and self loving choices.  He does it because He chooses to, that and nothing more.

Paul recorded these words in the great book of Ephesians.

It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.  We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.  Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.  Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!

How do you begin to love others like God?  You begin to believe the miracle of grace that it took for God to love you.  Then, you simply ask for the power of God to love people the same way God loves you.

An extra day in Calcutta.  What to do?  I went to visit the Mother Teresa House where her nuns still live and where she is buried in the heart of the city.  It is simple, plain and holy.  Some of her words are printed out on simple sheets of paper and stapled to the wall.  She said, “God has created us so we do small things with great love.”

God did great things through His greater love.  It is not too much to ask you to do small things because He loved you first.  For someone you know, those small things may be the best sermon they ever hear preached.

{ 4808 comments }