Jesus' Peer Group

As I sat in church today, I was mostly consumed with fighting off feelings of envy. In a world of people able to navigate, though not always flawlessly, the trecharous waters of intergender communication I feel utterly lost at sea. There is, as always, a girl I was interested in that I am reasonably sure was interested in another guy that I was reminded of today. He is quite a guy: athletic, talented, cool and popular and as I considered this, I rather wished I could be him, that I might woo those women I am interested in.

From this springboard, I began to consider that many firgues we see as figureheads in churches are the bubbly, charismatic, attractive people. And in a world of successful attractive married people, I feel rather out of place on every account. Socially akward with a job that leaves me spinning my wheels and a perfect strikeout record every time I approach the plate with a female, I wonder if there is a place int he church for me.

I might despair, but I remember something about what God values. God loves the lowly, the rejected, the humble, the sick. Jesus came, not as a powerful prophet storming the king's fortress, but as a carpenter's son in an oppressed nation. Born to a woman found to be pregnant before she was married, he may have carried this stigma all his life. At Judgement, one recorded criteria we remember is that whatever you do to the least of these: the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned - this you do for Him.

Perhaps our witness would be more powerful if we did not put so much effort into the double-standard: we speak as those who are lowly but avoid those who will drag down our social status, lock our doors against those that would steal the equipment we spend so much money for, and make church a place of "higher education" when our grasp of the basics feels so shaky. Perhaps when our faith costs us all we had wanted from life and we are left with nothing else, we will see just what value we assign to it.

I was younger and more naïve then. I prayed for brokenness. God answered. And for good or ill, life was never the same.