Discipleship at In-n-Out

Rachel and I were feeling lazy last Saturday, neither of us wanting to cook or clean up afterwards so we decided to partake in a So Cal delicacy, In N Out.

After ordering,  Rachel and I sat down with our four kids at one of the concrete tables in the outdoor seating area to wait for our food.  As we were seated, I saw a homeless neighbor who used to be a regular in Bellflower, who I hadn't seen for at least a year.  He's in his early 40's but his dissheveled hair, stuffed into a beanie cap and weathered skin make him look much older.  I knew his face but it took me a few minutes to figure out what his name was.  Thankfully as we made eye contact the Holy Spirit reminded me of it just in time as he approached our table.  

"Hi Mike!" I greeted him.  "I haven't seen you around for a while,  you doing okay?"  

I could've answered that question on my own.  By the looks of him he's not doing well at all and he's been drinking.  In fact he's so intoxicated that he almost fell to the ground trying to take a seat at the table next to us. 

"Got any change?" he asks after making some unintelligible comments about his near-fall.  I can see that I must look familiar to him but the alcohol is clouding his memory.

"My name is Ryan, and I'm sorry Mike," I answer, "I have a policy that I just don't give out cash.  But I would love to buy you a burger.  You hungry?"  

At first he refuses but then comes around and says he'll take a burger. 

While we were waiting for our orders, I did my best to keep the small talk going.  We talked about football, cars, his youth growing up in Paramount and going to high school there.  My kids were silent... I wasn't watching them but I am sure they were wondering who this guy was and why he was sitting with us.

I could see that all of my questions and conversation was making Mike feel restless.  

"I gotta go walk this off a little bit." Mike uttered as he got up to walk around a bit.  

Again he almost stumbled to the ground before making his way down the sidewalk scratching his stomach and saying something to himself.  The girl at the table next to us tightened her grip on her purse as he stumbled past her table.   I caught myself dealing with a bit of fear too. "What's the worst thing that could happen?" I think.  "He's just a guy in need of some human interaction.  He's not going to get us.  We might feel uncomfortable, but that's okay."

The brief respite gave us an opportunity to talk with the kids about what an opportunity this was to love "Mr. Mike"  our neighbor.  

"Mr. Mike doesn't have a house." I told them.  "We get a chance to have dinner with him.  This is what Jesus would do guys.  This is good."  "This is good." I think, "this is discipleship in it's most impactful form..."

Mike came back and his table was now occupied, so we cleared a space for him at our small table.  Our food came first and so I offered him one of our trays of fries and my coke so he can eat right away.  I ask him if we can pray for him and he says, "Pray that I get my life back together..."  So we all pray, thanking God for our meal and for the opportunity to have a meal with this blessed neighbor. 

He says he doesn't want any fries so I reclaim my basket from in front of him but as I do he grabs a few fries and says "oh I just have a few."  His visibly dirty hands grab a four fries from the pile and I look at the rest of the fries with a bit of disgust.  "You should have the whole thing." I insist, feigning generosity to cover for my germphobic disdain. 

His burger finally came and we all settled in to eat.  I caught myself several times feeling uncomfortable about the situation, and wanting to finish quickly and not having much of an appetite for the food just minutes before I was craving.   

Over the course of our meal, while I struggled to move the conversation forward, my mind fluttered to many somewhat competing thoughts...  

I felt itchy thinking about his "germs" (he told us he has scabies) and way too righteous as the other customers watched our family.  

I looked at our fellow customers, narcissistically wondering if they were watching us, thinking about how "good" we were, or conversely how bad of parents we must be.  I am ashamed

I pictured God smiling on our tribe.  I imagined him smiling at our simple obedience and chuckling at my discomfort, the way a dad does when he knows his kids are learning a good life-lesson.  

I reflected on how we were experiencing the Holy Spirit empowering us to love someone who, like the lepers in Jesus' day, was outcast and isolated from the community.

As our dinner concluded and we parted ways, I notice myself marked by this ordained appointment with Mike.

I wonder... how can our family better love neighbors like Mike?  

Will we embrace people with germs and visible manifestations of brokenness like mental illness that makes them difficult to communicate with and prone to self-medication?

What would happen if you and I were SEEKING and making the most of opportunities like these that humanize the lonely outcasts living among us?  

What will God do in us when we engage in relationships, sharing a meal with a human friend, instead of taking the easier, cleaner route of giving a poor beggar our loose change in an attempt to assuage our guilt and so doing unintentionally feed their addiction?

My prayer for us is that God will make us more like him as he stretches us and crosses our paths with others.  I pray that he will give us His eyes to see our neighbors as He does.  Most of all I pray that He will give us the discipline and intention we need as a busy people to pay attention to the opportunities like these that come our way on a daily basis.  

Good news: A local group takes a break from Bible Study

This weekend I heard some pretty cool news.  A group of Christians decided to stop meeting to study the Bible together.

Let me explain before you call me a heretic.

A group of mature Christians in Bellflower who have been meeting for several years in order to study the word together started reading the prophets of the old testament and something changed for them.  They read the texts in Isaiah and Jeremiah that clearly show God's heart for the orphans and widows.  They heard his rebuke of the people of Israel for neglecting the poor while they religiously continued to worship God with thier mouths.  They were convicted.  Then they did something pretty cool... they decided to be not only hearers of the word but doers.  They opted for simple plain-faced obedience.

They decided instead of just studying about God's heart for the orphans, that they would ACTUALLY try loving orphans themselves.  Their group is made up of busy people (as most of us So. Californians are) and so in order to make space in their lives, they stopped meeting for Bible study.  In place of this study they've invested themselves in serving and loving youth in foster care, the orphans of our community.  Now they meet with foster care kids one night a week for games, fun and generally spending time loving them. 

Oh that God would multiply this obedience in our land!  What it might look like if God were to break my heart and yours for the orphans and widows of our community?

What would Bellflower look like if we took some of the time that we budget for weekly religious activity/spiritual education and spent it DOING what Jesus taught and modeled...

loving the "lepers" of our society,
the chronically homeless,
the drug addicted,
the mentally ill,
the financially broken
the lonely neighbors we are surrounded by but so often pass on the otherside on our way to our various church meetings to study about God's heart for them.  

The church is an under-tapped treasure-trove of love, skill, passion, time and action, that far too often gets silo-ed into Bible-education based busy-ness.  I believe that God wants us to take our Bible with us into the trenches, to go read our Bible and do what it says  where the hurting people live.  Then our orthopraxy (right living/obedience) will catch up with our orthodoxy (Right thinking/doctrine).

Let me be clear. I am not advocating that people should stop reading the Bible. I am not saying Bible Studies are bad. New Christians especially, need to read the Bible and read it regularly with other believers so that they can fully understand the message of grace and the gospel of God's Kingdom.  We have to know what the Bible says in order to be obedient to it.

What I am imploring is that we in the church would not spend more of our time studying about obedience than we do becoming obedient. 

God give us room in our schedules for obedience.

"I just do what God tells me to do." --Timothy the street evangelist

When a couple of our case managers came in this morning and told me there was a "young guy on the corner with a sign" I immediately thought that he might be someone in need of housing or some sort of help.  So I headed out the door and casually approached the young man I assumed was in need of a good samaritan.  

As I approached I could see his sign wasn't an appeal for charity, but a hand written note on a piece of scratch paper encouraging people to seek Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  I found out that his name was Timothy and that he has some variety of intellectual disability.  He was standing there on the corner while his mom worked out at Curves, telling people that Jesus loved them.

I asked him why he decided to do this and he responded simply, "I just do what God tells me to do."

What a beautiful thing.  What a challenge to me. What is God telling me to do today?  Where and with whom does God want me to share the good news of Jesus today?  Oh that you and I would be more like Timothy today, and do what God tells us to do.

"As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.”  Luke 6

A prayer for Bellflower -- By Pastor Tom Hocking

Today the city of Bellflower hosted it's annual State of the City Address. As with many cities, Bellflower is facing some challenging days ahead as budgets tighten and the economy continues to struggle. The city manager entitled the talk, "The Rocky Road Ahead". I was particularly blessed by the prayer that my good friend Pastor Tom Hocking prayed as the invocation for the event. What he prayed was a powerful blessing for our city and I've included it below. Please pray it as you read:


Heavenly Father,
Thank you for this day,
Thanks for our city and the men and women who serve it and protect it.
Thanks for the opportunity to soberly consider where we stand as a community.
These are obviously difficult and uncertain times and I confess that I have struggled with feelings of anxiety—perhaps many of us have.
But God, when I think about it, the times when I have grown the most as a person have been times of great trouble, not times of ease.
So Lord Jesus, while we pray passionately for the peace and prosperity of Bellflower, I want to pray even more passionately that on the way toward peace (whether that peace is personal peace or social peace or financial peace or relational peace). . .I pray that on the way toward that peace, we would not forget that you and you alone are the giver of real peace—ultimate and eternal peace.
God, the road in front of us may indeed be a bit rocky. . .but considering that you once said that the wide and easy road leads to destruction. . .maybe a few potholes aren’t that bad.
But please help us to negotiate those potholes with grace and wisdom—and above all to make this journey together—loving each other more than ourselves and loving you most of all. I pray for Mayor smith and our Concilmembers: Bomgaars, Dunton, Koops, and Larsen; for Mike and his staff—that you would crown their efforts with abundant success. In Christ’s name, I pray Amen.

What do we do?

Today I spent a few hours with a homeless neighbor and her two young kids. We travelled down to Long Beach to see about getting them set up at a longer term shelter.

I wish I could say that throughout the whole process I remained utterly selfless, acting in the Jesus-like way that I'm supposed to. Sadly, I did not. After two hours of trying to entertain energetic preschool boys in a crowded government facility, I was less than chipper. I was concerned about when I was going to get lunch, somehow forgetting that this mom didn't even know if she was going to eat again in the near future.

Despite the imperfections in my attitude, I learned a lot about a piece of society that I don't often interact with. Long lines, endless referrals, dirty conditions, and judgmental attitudes are realities that this mom has to deal with every day. As I sat with her today, the questions kept rolling through my mind, "How can I best help her? What am I supposed to do? Is there any hope at all?".

I wanted to save the world in one afternoon. It's not going to happen. But I can start with being kind, with treating her as my friend and neighbor, rather than my client. I can choose allow my heart to be broken by the poverty of body and soul that I saw today. And I can pray.

What can you do?

Depth of Good Soil

Good Soil Industries has been busy, and that is a good thing! Cory (Good Soil employee) and I have spent many hours together, and seen each other at our best and worst moments. Yesterday was one of those days where nothing seemed to go right. At the end of the day Cory told me, “I’m always watching you. Watching how you respond.”
I thought, uh-oh.
Then Cory went on to bless me and share how he saw Christ in how I responded.
But, it isn’t a one-way blessing. I’ve learned so much from Cory. He’s taught me to trust in the power of the Holy Spirit in a new way. To pray with a child-like faith. We have seen each other’s strengths and weaknesses and encouraged one another.

Good Soil has mowed a lot of yards recently. But more than that, it has brought two guys together whose life stories are pretty different. And out of this relationship, we’re both more hopeful that transformation is possible.