neurological dryer lint

so i get this newsletter from lifespring (my church) every week and dick alexander, the senior pastor, writes a column. he's a remarkably insightful, down-to-earth guy and there are times that i'm shocked at the fact that there are a handful of churches and pastors out there that seem to 'get it' - not according to my standards (although i feel like the people there 'get' me) - but that they seem to have locked onto something - an idea or a feeling or a point of view - that relates to everyone, not just people who would go to a church. dick's column has often been something that makes me stop what i'm doing and sit down and read and think and take interest.

(though anything that grabs my attention that you can't plug into a wall outlet these days amazes me)

anyway his column this week made me point at the page and go 'ah-HA, yes!' which i also don't do often mainly because i look dumb when i do it. dick has this thing where he really gets people and how they work. i typed it up and i'm going to post it up here (hopefully with permission, they send it out free to people). it's called the burn zone.

On the mission trip to Ukraine last month, our flight from Cincinnati was late, causing us to miss our connection to Kiev, causing us to miss our connection to Kherson. This gave us an unexpected night in Kiev with Vlad Devakov.

Kiev was alive that week with tens of thousands of tourists from all over Europe attending “Eurovision 2005”, a week-long outdoor music competition wthat was surrounded by an ongoing rock concert – sort of an urban Woodstock.

Vlad took us downtown in Kiev to see the city and the crowd. On a crammed bus, a woman in our mission team struck up a conversation with two local first-year university students who knew a little English. They said they were out for an evening of beer and girls.

When we got off the bus, the students walked along and talked. As we made our way through the crowd, navigating into and out of underground passageways and then onto busses to see other sights, they hung with us – even after they found out we were Christians.

Walking through the festival sights, both of the guys grabbed bottles of beer. Since beer there is 16%, it doesn’t take long to get a buzz, and it didn’t take them long. But they stayed with us, posing with their beer bottles in a group picture we took of our mission team.

Only when we got back on the bus to go back to where we were staying for the night did they finally leave our group, but not before exchanging email addresses. And when we came back through Kiev on the way back to the US, they joined us for dinner.

Where in the US would that happen? Could you imagine non-believing university students anywhere in America wanting to be with a group of Christians?

Vlad commented that these guys were outside the “burn zone”. He meant that they had not been “burned” by the Christians. In Ukraine that happens with evangelistic crusades. A foreign evangelist blows through a town, draws a crowd, gets people to come forward for a “decision”, and goes back home to report a great crusade – leaving those who responded as sheep without a shepherd, more vulnerable than before, and bitter.

When Vlad described the “burn zone” we realized instantly that our entire country is a burn zone. Pushy neighbors, the “religious right”, self-centered churches, immoral priests, televangelists, and judgmental and hypocritical co-workers have left America burned by the “Christianity” they’ve seen.

When a burn is fresh, it is extremely tender – the slightest tough produces a reflexive withdrawal. After a while, it scars over and becomes desensitized to any touch. Could there be a more accurate picture of the spiritual climate around us?

But the situation is not by any means hopeless – we’re just swimming upstream. The last 50 years have not been the finest hour for God’s people in our country, so we’ve got work to do.

In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller tells about two women he knew one of whom was anti-Christian. But she had a Christian friend named Nadine, about whom she said:

"Nadine and I would sit and talk for hours in her room… mostly we would talk about boys or school, but always, by the end of it, we talked about God. The thing I loved about Nadine was that I never felt she was selling anything. She would talk about God as if she knew Him, as if she talked to Him on the phone that day… some Christians I had encountered… felt like they had to sell God, as if He were a soap or a vacuum cleaner, and it’s like they weren’t listening to me; they didn’t care, they just wanted me to buy their product… Nadine believed that God liked her. I thought that was beautiful. And more than that, her faith was a spiritual thing that produced a humanitarianism that was convincing…"