A couple of weeks again my mom and I went to Levelland for one of my students birthdays. Mom had the chance to go to Sunday school with me on Sunday before our mad dash back to Dublin to help Gran decorate for her upcoming VBS and a movie night at our church. In Sunday School we are going through James. We have been diving into what it looks like in it raw form and talking about how it still applies to us today. We came across the part where James tells us that we need to take care of the orphans and the widows. Well in the car mom started talking about it again because it was a lot to chew on. She said that we need to not only look at from a physical sense but also in the spiritual sense. There are tons of people out there who are orphans spiritual, and they need someone to be that example for them. Yes the kids have parents at home but their parents are the Christian example that they are looking for. One example comes to my mind. When I was in youth group we had two girls who would come to church on their own. Neither one of their parents came but it was a decision that they made that they wanted to be in church even if they did not have they example set for them by their parents. These girls are what my mom would say are spiritual orphans.
All of this also led us to the discussion of how we as the church treat people. I love to people watch and so when I go to church or are around people I enjoy watching how they interact with other people. I have noticed in church (and this is not all churches or all people just some I have been to) that if a person does not fit the model that we think should be set for you to be there then they get ignored or worse made fun of. Casting Crowns wrote a song called "If We are the Body," that talks about this exact thing. In VBS this week we talked about how God made us in his image and that he saw it was good. So if God says these people are made in his image what gives us the right to think we can turn them away or make them feel like we are judging them or to make them feel like they have no right to be there because they have every right. Christ says that he did not come for the healthy but for the sick. The model we set is all wrong. The people that get made fun of or ignored those are the people we are called to love and to bring into the family of Christ but we are too busy calling them crazy or judging them for how they are different then us. Brandon Heath sings a song called "Give Me Your Eyes" that is a pray I think we should all pray, "Give me your eyes for just one second, give me your eyes so I can see everything that I keep missing. Give me your love for humanity." If we had the eyes of God these people would never feel the way they do when they walk through the doors of the church, instead they would feel the awesome power of Christ love. So maybe that should be our prayer as a church, that God would give us his eyes so that we could see people for who they are and not what they look like or how much they annoy us.
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