Walls make us feel safe. They make us feel secure. They protect us from the outside, the weather, the unpredictability of what we do not know or cannot control.

The same with the metaphorical walls we build between us and everyone else. Those of a different social class, race, culture, sexuality, or political bent. These walls make us feel safe, and they protect us from the unpredictability of what we do not know or cannot control.

When Jesus shows us what love looks like, it is a love without walls. It is a love which knows a loose Samaritan woman, a rich and corrupt tax collector, an adulteress, and a Roman soldier. These are people Jesus may not have had too much in common with, yet he makes time to love them.

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A week ago my housemates and I, along with some other DOOR staff, participated in some urban camping.  Each of us had our own reasons for participating; mainly hoping to have our eyes opened to a little bit of what a night on the streets with no money would look like. One night in solidarity with those who have been shunned and ignored by our city, most recently with the passing of a “camping ban” which further incriminates and disturbs an already demonized population.

In my night on the street, most of it was spent in distrust. I wondered what the people sitting around me on the mall-ride shuttle thought about my sleeping bag and my coffee-grounds-covered Starbucks food I had obviously reclaimed from a dumpster in an alley. I wondered what the people passing me were laughing at as they passed Sarah and I eating our coffee flavored food on a park bench in the howling wind. I wondered when the waitress at the jazz club would ask us to leave. I worried about the source of every distant conversation, clanging, or whirring noise while I laid exhausted in a wide drainage gutter between a church and a parking garage well after midnight. Finally, I drifted nervously to sleep.

Thinking back on that experience, I am reminded of all of the opportunities I missed.  All the people I passed by and who passed by me, who I could have easily asked their name or their story. But my walls were up. I wanted to be in solidarity with the homeless, but I didn’t want to know them.

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It is a painful reminder that we don’t really take the time to know people who aren’t like us. . .

It is the reason that we have white churches and black churches. Rich churches and poor churches. Hipster churches and alternative churches. We’re comfortable around people who are like us. . . and it seems to me that in the age to come, there will be mostly people who aren’t like us . . . no matter who we are.

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So I pray that God may give us the opportunities to know people who are different than us in many many ways. So that in taking that opportunity, the difference and the space that relationship creates, God may fill it with Love to the glory of God’s holy name.

-grace and peace