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?