When I lived in Virginia, I was blessed to help prepare lunch and serve it to our homeless brothers and sisters through the feeding ministry of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Richmond.
On a Thursday morning in 2007, I met Butch Griner, the man who spent a decade coordinating the feedings before his death in the summer of 2011. (His obituary offered this astounding fact:
“For more than 10 years he coordinated the care and feeding of over 140,000 guests.”)
Butch dearly loved to put together the Thursday lunches, which on many days brought more than 300 people off the streets to be fed. His obituary also included this great truth: “He took great pride in serving a meal that would outdo the cafeteria chains, all for less than a dollar per plate since he did most of his shopping at the Central Virginia Food Bank.”
In the moments leading up to 11:45 am, when the Richmond police officer beckoned those with tickets 1-10 to go through the line, Butch would take a tray and go down the line, showing the servers exactly where to put what.
Everything had a specific compartment on the tray.
Butch kept an eye on our serving.
If we got too sloppy he would remind us to slow down a bit and keep what we were serving in the right compartment.
Compartments are good for food trays, you see.They are not for our lives.
Far too many of us attempt to live a compartmentalized life. We keep our faith in one compartment, our work or school life in another, our hobbies in another, and maybe our friends in another. Every now and then something might spill over from one compartment to another.
But like sloppy servers at St. Paul’s we get everything back to where it’s supposed to be soon enough. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, though.
As the authors
Sticky Faith
like to say, our aim should be a chicken pot pie kind of life, where everything is blended together in the broth of our faith.
In his Message translation of the Bible, Eugene Peterson translates the first verse of Romans 12 like this: “So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life — your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life — and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.”
To truly embrace our faith is, I think, to acknowledge God in every bit of everyday, ordinary life.
I sincerely try to be the same way all the time, with all of the people who come my way. I try to be an open book. Simply put, I don’t invest time in trying to figure out what someone might want me to say or what I should say. I just say what I believe. (Lord knows, by now you’d think I would have learned that it’s fine
not
to say what I think, i.e. to just to keep my mouth shut and say nothing at all. I forget that sometimes. Mastering that skill is still on my to-do list.)
Simply put, I’m not OK with pretending to be someone I’m not.
Sins sink my ship just as surely as they sink any other’s.
I can’t stand condescending, self-righteous, holier-than-thou kind of living.
If that’s not compartmentalizing your own life, it’s certainly compartmentalizing God’s children and implying somehow that you’re the entrée while the rest of us are just the peas, or the peons as it were.
So, may each of us place our “everyday, ordinary life … before God as an offering,” refusing to be compartmentalized, refusing to “become so well-adjusted to (our) culture that we fit into it without even thinking.”
Spilling over into other places might not make for an attractive tray in the serving line, but when it comes to our faith it surely gets us closer to the kind of life Jesus would have us lead now, doesn’t it?
