A Road Less Travelled

Shock: 1 a : to strike with surprise, terror, horror, or disgust

Shock: Finding out the world doesn’t work the way you thought it did.

I have been writing about my relationship and my dealings with a woman named Kathey. In many ways she has been a defining moment in my life. A woman said “I need help� and the church has risen up to help her as we can. Our family especially has felt a burden for her. And she tells that she can never say how grateful she is for us. She says that we are the first family she has had in a while and the only family that has loved her. She tells us events from her life that she won’t tell other people. Why? Because we are not shocked. We don’t stand back and say “Oh my! I can not believe that could happen!� I feel sometimes that I should be feeling shocked, but I don’t. I still feel that it is really bad and my heart aches for her that she had to walk that road, but it does not shake me at all. It does not change my opinion of the world I live in. I look at it and I see it and I name it as evil. But it is not evil that surprises. No, far from it. Sometimes I find myself saying, “Yes, that makes sense.� And I shudder that I could think such a thing. But then I look at Kathey and I listen to her tales. And I see the relief when I tell her I understand.

My brothers, my sisters, we cannot be shocked. We may not. It is a luxury we must not indulge in. The world is evil, set that in your minds. If we even once say that “No, that couldn’t happen� we will lose them. The hurting people who have been wounded in ways you never imagined. They will despise us at the first gasp of surprise. Please, I plead with you, look at the world how it really is. We live in today and the days are dark. And we go into the darkness and we bring the light. But the light needs to see the darkness. It needs to see the darkness and accept the fact that there is real evil in the world that does some really horrible things. Because the people coming out of darkness need to know that they do not shock us. They are not out there, different from us. They need to know that we love them. We need to be able to reach out and touch the leper. And yes, you will feel dirty. You will wonder why you feel like you’ve just been dragged through the gutter. But that is where they live. And that is where we need to be.

“I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles; but on a cross between two thieves on the town’s garbage heap; at a crossroad so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek… at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died and that is what He died about. That is where the churchmen ought to be and what the churchmen ought to be about.�

-George McLeod quoted in Radically Unchurched