If you know me, you know that I get scared super easily... my brown eyes grow to be the size of a watermelon, I jump about five feet in the air, and occasionally I make some weird sound. Trust me, you would have not wanted to be around me in high school whenever we had fire drills. You would have most likely been hit in the head with a pen or a calculator or something.
Have you used the word "sketchy" to describe a person or a place? I use it ALL the time (maybe because I'm scared all the time? LOL). According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word "sketchy" is defined as "likely to be bad or dangerous." Like most of y'all, I use the word to describe dark alley ways, run-down Mexican restaurants, downtown Green Bay (at night), fake clowns, pop-ups that claim I won $1,000, houses with the "beware of dog" signs in the windows, infomercials, etc.
I also tend to use this word to describe people. Maybe you do too.
"That gangsta walking toward me looks so sketchy!"
"Oh, crap... look at all those hoodlums with skateboards... SKETTCCCHYYY."
"He is SO sketchy... he just smiled at me across the hall! Who does he think he is?!"
Notice something about all three of these quotes? Here it is: When I call someone or a group of people sketchy, I don't even know who they are. I'm looking at what I see on the outside instead of what's on the inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah... what I just said was SUPER cheesy, but taking all cheesiness aside, it's true. And we can't help it. We all judge people by what we see... it's just what we do because we're broken people.
Let me tell you a story.
One Tuesday night this past September, I got a group of friends together for a "worship night" down on the city deck in downtown Green Bay. I brought my guitar and we jammed for Jesus for like, a full-on hour straight. It was awesome!! It was SO cool to be a witness to the random people walking by, just by praising our God. How sweet is it that we live in a place where we can worship our Savior freely.
Anyway, after the worship sesh, my friend Alyssa and my sister Haley and I walked down the deck to go to the bathroom. There were these skateboarder dudes doing tricks and stuff a little ways down the deck that we had to pass to get to the bathroom, and my first thought was, "Keep walking. Avert your eyes. Don't slow down. WALK."
We came closer and closer to the "sketchy" dudes, and as we passed them, one dude in a tie-dye shirt with long blonde hair said, "Hey ladies, how's it going?" Oh no. He just crossed the line. Totally flirting. Next thing you know, he'll be following us home. Gotta get the pepper spray out.
We quickly shouted back that we were FINE!, and continued to walk faster and faster to the bathroom. OUR LIVES WERE ON THE LINE, PEOPLE. (sarcasm)
After doing our business, we had to walk past the skateboarders again. Once more, we averted our eyes and walked straight ahead towards our destination. Then something happened that I would have never expected to happen in a million bazillion gillion years.
I saw the tie-dye shirt guy walk up to us and he said something like,
"Hey, I just wanted to say that what you guys are doing over there is super cool and it's awesome to see people so passionate about what really matters."
Hold up.
The tie-dye shirt guy said that? The "sketchy" one that we were preparing ourselves to pepper spray? Yes, yes he did say that.
The point of this story is, God doesn't call us to judge one another. Not based on looks, not based on actions, not based on words. We are not on His throne, and until we are (which will never happen, by the way), we will never be in the place where we can rightly judge someone else.
It's so easy to look at someone with green hair, saggy pants, and gauges the size of a quarter (and maybe a tie-dye shirt) and think, "Wow, I would never associate myself with THAT person." It's so easy for us to avoid people that we don't want to talk to, just because they look "sketchy" and we just don't want to deal with the awkwardness of the situation we anticipate.
But God never calls us to be comfortable.
Is this something I'm still working on? Yes. Is this something I will ever be perfect at? No. Like I said before, we are a broken people. All of us. Your pastor is just as broken as the kid next to you in class that smokes pot and hooks up on the weekends. God created us to be in need of the same thing... Love. And what's awesome about God is that He is Love.
I want to love the way God loves me. What does this look like? This looks like inviting a green-haired-swaggy-pants guy out to dinner. This looks like not seeing your interactions with random people as interruptions but rather as opportunities- opportunities to listen, to speak, to share, and to just be present. Real love - the way God loves us - is scary. But He calls us to love like we're not scared (cue For King & Country :P).
Honestly, I probably won't ever see the tie-dye shirt guy ever again. Who knows what God has in store. But I do know this: every day I see someone I have never ever seen before. Think about it - at a grocery store, gas station, on campus, walking their dog, etc. And this means that every day I see someone that I will never see again.
God has given these opportunities to us for a reason... during that one moment you encounter that one person, don't take it for granted. Don't avert your eyes. Don't start walking faster. Be that rare person that looks them straight into the eyes, smiles, and loves.
Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.
While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
- Mark 2:13-17
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