"Right in the Middle of it"

If you should ever come down to Hermosillo Mexico to visit us and the ministry here, you will find a strange sight as you approach our Church/Ministry Centre. It is surrounded by garbage! Over the last number of years, the dusty dirt road that passes by the front of the church has become a bit of a garbage dump really. You will notice the church at the end of the road in the picture.

On Saturday mornings I usually walk to the church for our weekly men’s meeting and already by 8am the sun is getting hot (we do live in the desert after all!). The searing sun nicely heats up the rotting garbage, not to mention the carcasses of dead dogs and cats that have been left amongst the garbage. All of this provides a distinct odour as one prepares their heart for worship………………………

Now that your stomach is queasy and you are wondering why I have decided to provide you with this intimate glimpse of our church setting, let me explain the point.

Jesus said, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.”- Jn 17:15. It struck me one day as I passed by one of those rotting dogs (my nose knew it before my eyes did), that Jesus wants us to be “right in the middle of it”- (my interpretation). When you think about it, where did Jesus spend most of His time when He was living on the earth? I will tell you this, it wasn’t in the temple. He was out there with the sick, the hurting, and the suffering. He got involved in the lives of the dirty and smelly people and He wasn’t afraid to touch them. He even explained why He wasn’t just hanging out in the temple most of the time- “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” –Mk. 2:17.

It doesn’t take long to realize that many things in your and my world are a mess. Just pick up the paper, listen to the news on the radio or turn on the TV. It is all around us and it reaches right into our very neighbourhoods. To me, the garbage in front of our church that one must pass in order to enter the church, is symbolic of the mess that is our world. However this isn’t depressing news to me! You see “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” – Jn. 3:17. How can we be Jesus’ hands and feet and continue the work that He started when He walked dusty dirty roads Himself, if we aren’t “out there in the garbage”?

God wants to change the smell of our world from the odour of rotting garbage, to the sweet smell of redeemed lives! He hasn’t changed over the years, He is still about the same thing, changing lives. The most amazing thing about it is that He invites us to be involved in the process. With His help you and I can “clean up the neighbourhood” to the point that the stench of sin is replaced with the amazing aroma of redeemed lives. We can’t do it however, if we turn a blind eye to the garbage and just drive through it into our garages and close our doors. That is pretending that the mess isn’t there. Or perhaps it is getting so used to the mess that we have given up and just accepted that it will always be there.

Our challenge is to get out and walk through the mess- physically- to remind ourselves of the stench and to determine to find God working in it- it means getting involved in the lives of our neighbours. He wants to change messy lives, He wants to redeem them. He wants to use us to do it just like Jesus did it. We need to be involved in the lives of those who need Him, we can’t ignore them or keep them at an arms length, that sounds like what the Pharisees did as they tried to avoid “getting dirty” in the public squares.

Lets remember that God has put us in the world to bring the sick and dirty and hurting to Him so that He can redeem them and save them! He hasn’t put us in the world just to have us avoid the world. So next time you see or smell the rotting garbage in lives of those who don’t know our Lord, determine not to avoid them, but rather to introduce them to the one who can clean up all the garbage!