I suppose that when we begin to pray for God to make us mindful of humanity’s woundedness, to increase the tenderness of our hearts towards the pain of others, and to give us opportunities to comfort others with the comfort with which He has comforted us…we should expect an answer. But I confess, sometimes? His answers—and the ways in which they come—are rather shocking to me.

Last night was one of those nights that I found the divine tweaking of my life plans to be rather…shocking.

It’s finals week here at Liberty…and as a result, I’ve been spending more than the usual amount of time in hibernation with my textbooks and my own befuzzled thought processes (the latter is possibly not a good thing).

However, each year, Liberty does a sort of campus-wide talent show—and you have to be rather talented to get in as a performer, so it actually is rather impressive to watch—on the Friday night of the first official day of finals. A kind friend had purchased a ticket for me to attend, but I guess yesterday, I just wasn’t feeling it—sometimes there is something inside of me that rebels at the thought of being surrounded by crowds of people when my heart and mind are desperately longing for time alone under a starlit sky—I call them wilderness moments…because sometimes, we just need to withdraw from the rest of the human race and spend some time listening for what God is really trying to say to us (it’s a pattern first modeled by Christ, and you know, He was a pretty cool guy, so...just saying).

Thus, at around eleven o’clock, when everyone else was just settling down to watch the wonders of Christmas Coffeehouse on Liberty’s campus, I was driving up the side of a mountain in the dark, humming under my breath, and only half aware of the millions of different thoughts churning around inside my brain.

As I turned onto my street, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a young man walking alongside the road. He was dressed all in black—black t-shirt, black shorts—and no reflective anything on him anywhere.

That’s weird, I thought to myself, and kinda dangerous. If you’re gonna be out at night to exercise, at least wear something besides black so people can see you.

I kept driving, but somehow, something about the situation wasn’t sitting right with me.

Thea, a little voice nagged, you’ve gotta go back. If he was just out here to exercise this late at night, then why wasn’t he running? He had a backpack on.

So I turned the car around, and went back to check on him. As I pulled up alongside him, I rolled down my window and asked him if he was ok.

He looked a little dazed, and I wasn’t sure at first whether or not he was drunk. I was surprised by how young he was—he was just a highschool kid, at the most.

“Um, I’m…really not ok,” he mumbled, tottering a little bit as he headed towards my car.

As he got closer, I could see that he was telling the truth.

“What on earth happened to your face, man?!” I blurted. There was blood oozing from a number of abrasions on his head, and dried blood all around his mouth—somebody had obviously roughed him up a bit.

“Uh, a guy beat me up,” he said dazedly, staring into my face vacantly. “Can you help me?”

“Well, I can’t exactly leave you out here to freeze to death,” I retorted. “Get in the car.”

He’d been out in the cold for three hours without a coat, in his shirtsleeves and shorts, and it took him an hour just to stop shivering. Gradually, as I peppered him with questions and tried to calm him down, his story began to come out in bits and pieces between sobs and long pauses.

I have rarely seen desperation manifested quite as obviously as it was in this child. He literally leaned over and latched onto my arm like a frightened kitten, clinging to me and weeping for two hours as I cradled his head in the crook of my arm and stroked his hair and just asked questions, and listened, and prayed silently for wisdom to know what to say next.

Sometimes the depth of pain and hurt that humanity is capable of inflicting upon each other is so dark, so twisted, and so wrong on every level that when it confronts you directly, the shock of it is so visceral that you almost want to vomit. This was a kid that everybody had thrown away—his parents had ditched him, leaving him with an elderly grandfather who later died. Foster care had no answers and no place to really call home, and so when he turned 18, he fled the system. Kids at school told him he was a disgrace to his species and didn’t look human. And the one person he’d ever met whom he hoped might actually care—a girl he met at the mall and started dating—had dumped him that night, and then her step-brother had finalized it by trying to punch out his lights.

Sometimes there are no words to give voice to the emotions of the soul as you listen to a story like this and realize that it could have been your own. Is he a pitiful, broken, wounded, whiney, groveling creature? Yes. He’s not perhaps the kind of person that it’s easy to love. But it’s these people—the ones that require a lot more grace to care about? It’s these people that the church is called to minister to—and it’s also these people that we’re best at ignoring, dismissing, and secretly despising just as the rest of the human race does.

It’s not possible to undo 18 years of garbage in two hours on a Friday night. I didn’t even try. He was hungry and cold, so we fixed that, and then he just listened as I explained the fallenness of the human condition, what it is that we are saved from, and what it is that we are saved to, and what it means to serve a God who has declared us to be of value—what it means to serve a God who loves us, holds us, protects us, nurtures us, disciplines us, sees us as we really are—and cares enough not to leave us there in our own filth.

And then I took him back to the apartment where he lives alone, and gave him my phone number, and promised him that I’ll walk with him through the process of whatever it takes to help him start getting some things straightened out, and getting him plugged into some kind of community that actually cares.

What really made my heart sick as I drove away that night was that he told me that he’d been going to one of the local Lynchburg churches for over a year—but that no one knows him there. And maybe no one really cares, I thought to myself with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I recognize that it’s not socially acceptable to open our arms, our homes, and our hearts to society’s social outcasts. But if the church—claiming to represent the loving compassion of an accepting, forgiving, holy, and just God—refuses to love this subset of society…then my question is, who is left? The rather sobering question that’s been on my mind all morning is, who picks up the slack when God’s people refuse to act on their responsibility to be messengers of mercy, and make disciples of all men?

Liberty’s campus is relatively large—not so large, perhaps, as Duke’s campus, or Brown University, or something…but it’s biggerish. And parking is ridiculous…so in order to avoid the trauma of having to potentially find a parking spot more than once in a day? We walk. Everywhere. And doubtless, that is good for our characters and our cardiovascular systems, so no complaining on that note.

But yesterday, as I was walking from the cafeteria to the library, I was looking into people’s faces, like I always do when I walk, and I was struck—as I am frequently—by the fact that despite the fact that this is technically a Christian school, there is so much hurt in people’s eyes. And more than half the time, you can’t even catch the eyes, because the face is looking down—drawn, stressed, introspective, and insecure.

By the time I actually made it to the library, I could feel the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.

“God, there’s SO much hurt here, even just on this campus. And we’re the ones that are supposed to have the answers, supposed to be offering hope—where do we start when it comes to mending the broken pieces of this generation, and what role do I—as the individual—play in this?”

It’s frighteningly easy for me not to care. In fact, for the last several months, despite the fact that I was technically doing everything right—spending time in Scripture, and praying for those around me, and being an active part of the church community and blah blah blah—I’ve kinda gone into survival mode, and I’ve had a growing sense of the fact that I was emotionally and spiritually disconnecting…that somehow, the truth that I was reading with the eyes of my mind wasn’t permeating to color the perceptions of my heart…and what I was doing with my hands wasn’t springing from a deep-seated sense of compassion or real caring.

It’s appalling how easily we can delude ourselves—and others—into thinking that going through the motions is the real thing.

God mercifully opened my eyes to the extent of my own callousness last week and gave me a glimpse of the direction in which my heart had turned in sort of an unexpected way. It was one o’clock in the morning, and I was sitting in a parking lot in a car, listening to a friend pour out some of the struggles of his soul…and suddenly I realized that this was the first time in weeks that I’d actively tried to care about somebody besides myself on any real level. And the realization was startling, and humbling…and as I sat there listening, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of shame. God doesn’t always speak in an audible voice, but sometimes…it’s almost audible:

“Thea, what on earth? How do you MISS it this badly for this long? How did you get so caught up in caring so much about what other people think of you, what other people are doing, and how they’re perceiving you that you lost three months of your life when you could have and should have been reaching out to people as they really are and caring for them as they really need to be cared for? Do you think I don’t know it when your heart isn’t with Me? Do you think I can’t sense your relational disconnectedness when your time with Me is just a ritual?”

As I drove home that night, the tears were rolling down my face and making little splashy tracks all over my steering wheel. The big plastic buttons on my coat probably thought it was raining. But somehow, the pain of God bringing us against the brick wall of a harsh realization is a pain that is redemptive, restorative, and freeing—and the tears were a good thing.

My prayer since then has been that God would keep my heart tender—that I would never become immune to the pain of others, that my eyes would never be able to ignore the needs, and that my heart would never be able to refuse to weep for those who are bleeding inside. It’s overwhelming to live this way. It’s beyond the handling capacity of my emotional and physical resources. But perhaps we were designed and called to live in a way that demands of us more strength than we have and more love than we are capable of giving so that we never come to the point of thinking that we no longer have a need for the One whose unending strength and infinite love have enabled men to do the seemingly-impossible since the beginning of the human race.

Thanksgiving. Giving of thanks. Noticing and appreciating the little things. Gratitude. Such simple concepts. Such an enriching way of approaching life. Such pathetically neglected and underused thinking in reality.

During the past week, as I was basking in the warm glow of being reunited at long last with my family after what feels like nearly a year of separation, I was challenged at times—usually by little things that people said or did—to ask myself if I have formed the habit of thankfulness, and whether I am actively cultivating a spirit of gratitude on a regular basis.

One instance in particular kind of stuck with me even as I deplaned on Virginian soil. See, I have two nephews and a niece, all of whom I am frightfully proud of, and five awesome siblings with two amazing additions by marriage—and often times, it is through one of these mediums that I am most forcibly reminded of my own need to sit back and reevaluate.

One of my nephews, Brock, is very nearly three years old. And he’s precious, and adorable, and possessed of a very compassionate and sensitive little heart. But as with most two year olds, he’s also very possessive of everything that he considers to be rightfully his.

I was a bystander one morning when he discovered that his baby sister, Lauren, was wearing a pair of his socks. Now, he had been running around barefooted all morning, and he had a different pair of socks stuffed inside of his little boots in case the notion to wear shoes might enter his tiny head, but somehow, all of this was completely irrelevant when it came to the fact that Lauren had been dressed in clothing items which he knew to be rightfully his.

“Mom,” he wailed, instantly very distraught, “did you think that maybe I would want my socks?!”

Ok, it was amusing. And yeah, I laughed. But then I had to do a quick double-take, and ask myself how often that kind of blatant selfishness characterizes my own thinking. The verse that came to mind was Proverbs 3:28, where Solomon or some other smart person is admonishing his readers, “Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come back, and tomorrow I will give it,’ when you have it with you.”

Maybe I’m not so much guilty of this one with my physical possessions…but with my time? Uf dah. Yeah, generosity in that area is a struggle, and I realized (a wee bit guiltily) that I definitely need to work on being more grateful for the time that people have chosen to invest in/share with me and to be more intentional in investing time in others.

On that note, I must say that over this particular break? I am especially grateful for the time invested by my tiny niece and new baby nephew, both of whom invested large quantities of sleep time and prodigious quantities of drool and baby urp in their oldest auntie. I miss it already, and I’ve only been back at school for half a week.