On Friday night, Orin and I and the band performed a concert to help kickoff a Luke:18 retreat for middle-schoolers in Belleville, IL. The show went really well, due in large part to the enthusiasm of the teens. To be honest, the leaders of this particular retreat program have invited us to do this very concert so many times before that it ends up having a bit of a “hometown crowd” feel for us. Walking in, we know they are ready for us, which only helps things to go well. It’s a tremendous amount of fun.
Still, through the crowd of singing, clapping, and excited youth, I could see the occasional bored face. I was drawn to the random teen choosing to stand there with folded arms, refusing to join in the fun. I couldn’t help but notice the few teens looking as though they wished they could be anywhere else. And while scenes like this are nothing new for a person like me, with experience as both performer and as a youth minister, I am still thrown a little when it happens. I want to reach these teens. As a performer, I want to turn this moment around for them. I want them to react with the same joy I see on the faces of the other young people. As a youth minister, I want to know their story. Is their behavior a result of shyness or introversion? Is the sullen look on their face the result of having never before attended an event like this? Perhaps they’re self-conscious. Perhaps they just don’t like the music. It could be any number of things or nothing at all. If I were on that team, these are the teens I would gravitate to over the course of the weekend. It would bug me to think that someone on that retreat was hanging out in the margins, whether by their own choice or not. I know what it’s like to feel that way, and I would want to ensure that someone noticed them and invited them into the community.
At Oddwalk appearances lately, I’ve been reflecting on the story (found in three different gospels) of Jesus healing the paralyzed man. The most detailed account of this story can be found at the beginning of the second chapter of Mark. When I read this story, I am most fascinated with the four people who brought this man to Jesus. Were these friends of the man? Where they just people in town who knew him? Family, perhaps? Scripture doesn’t say. What is clear, though, is that they cared enough about this man that they brought him through town to the house where Jesus was preaching, hoisted him (and themselves) up on a roof, tore a hole in that roof, and lowered him down to Jesus. Most people with serious ailments in Jesus’s time lived on the margins of society, partly because of the constraints of the ailment itself, and partly because it was thought that any ailment that serious must have been the consequence of some sin committed by that person or by some part of that person’s family tree. Praise God that this paralyzed man had at least four people around him to notice him, care for him, and bring him to Jesus, regardless of what it took to make that happen.
Whether it’s a seemingly bored kid at a retreat, the sick and suffering in our community, or any number of other persons who sit at the margins of our society, personal contact, just noticing those people, can make a huge difference in a person’s life. Who are those people in your life? Do you notice them? Do you know their name? Do you know their story?
Who knows? Perhaps a kind word from you, or just a bit of your time, could make an enormously positive impact in that person’s life.
-Shannon