The other day I accidentally visited the church I left in 1999. Lately I’ve been driving a relative to doctor appointments, and we were out and about after a nice lunch together. There was a half-hour wait for the next appointment, and we both needed a bathroom, but the doctor’s office was closed for lunch. So, there, voila, across the street, was the church I used to go to. They had a bathroom.
I went to the church office and saw two women I used to know. They smiled and seemed genuinely happy to see me. I explained our situation and asked about using their restrooms, and the women said, sure, go ahead. Then they went back to their computers. Neither of them looked up again when my relative and I passed their window coming and going.
I had a familiar pang of emotion. Often, attending that church, I felt like the people treated me in such a manner — they didn’t look up at me in reassurance at times I considered it would have been nice for them to do so. Around that group, I felt rather ignored and small.
Later the other day, I reconsidered my reaction. Maybe there was a fuller context to try to examine.
I have learned, from the best teachers over my life’s decades, that context is king. We long for fullness. No one gets a full picture of reality in this life, but each of us was implanted with the desire to know, to apprehend. Context is the (mostly invisible to others) stuff surrounding what we say, what we do. It’s also the “stuff,” or the reality, surrounding what God says and does. Reality is God’s business. No one knows why God does what He does in reality without understanding, without a fuller picture of the context. Only God can give that fuller picture.
How does God give a person more fullness? I can, of course, only speak for myself. If I didn’t believe God “revealed Himself to men,” I would be a very different person living a very different life. My children wouldn’t have been born. As I said to someone recently, “I would so be a worldly academic.” By implication, from what I have seen of worldly academics, I would no longer believe God exists. I might go through the motions of believing; I might belong to a “faith community.” But the context of my existence would probably not really include a Creator who is a Person and who might reveal Himself to men, to me.
The past year has given me what I consider glimmers of a fuller picture of God’s context. From this small awakening, as I see it, a bit of creative understanding might be starting to emerge. Regarding the church office women, maybe they weren’t ignoring my relative and me. Maybe, out of deferential kindness, they were leaving us be. Maybe they were meditatively working for the Lord, to their fullest.
Pondering this my brain says, don’t forget that back when you went to their church, you saw other things that helped inform your suspicion that people like these women didn’t care about you.
And then from a new context I conclude, so what? What if I’m supposed to, what if I’m now allowed to, give a person a creative context, a view toward the longing each of us has for God, for Christ, for bowing to His longings and His love? Maybe this is what love demands. Maybe I would rather have people, in various sorts of contexts, do so unto me.
When relaxed, at table, new friends acquaintancing, while storminess abated outside wide windows, sipping vodka, sharing past adventures, the value of the now, the free, the aboveground, the opulence, contrasted vividly in the mind with the story being shared.
