Cross the Road

Have you realized how much division there is in our society?  It seems that division and separation exists everywhere:  between liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites, young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor, Jews and Muslims, Christians and atheists, Protestants and Catholics, Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox, etc...  Even within our own personal faith communities, we experience division that often causes me to wonder if we have any clue what the Gospels are all about.  One of the reasons that I like working with Life Groups, is because they can be a safe haven from the issues that cause disunity within the Kingdom of God.  Regardless of what's going on in our world, we can set aside our differences and rest in the safe haven of our Life Group communities.  It is in these communities that we not only strive to avoid the division, but it's where we go the extra mile to help each other heal from the disunity that exists in varying degrees in all of our lives.  

This Sunday, Susan spoke about the Parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25-37.  As I often do, I began to think specifically how the story applied to Life Groups.  Without rehashing the story, because I'm sure all of you were in church Sunday, right? ;)  But after Jesus tells the parable, He asks the teachers of the law, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?"  They answer, “The one who had mercy on him.”  Notice what Jesus is trying to get across in this story.  The neighbor is not man lying on the side of the road, beaten, stripped and left for dead.  The neighbor was the Samaritan, who despite ethnic, religious and cultural divisions, crossed the road "went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him."  Quite simply, our neighbors are the ones that are willing to cross the road for us.

Are we all wiling to cross the road for those in our Life Group communities?  And when new people join our groups that are different than us, think differently than we do, or even believe differently than we do, are we still willing to cross the road?  Maybe if we learn to erase the divisions in our Life Groups, the effects will spread to the other communities in which we find ourselves.  When we start to pay more attention to what's going on on the other side of the road, we realize that our neighbors might be the least ones we expect. In fact, isn't that what the Kingdom of God is all about?  Revealing the unexpected to an expecting world?