by Dan Baumgartner

Whatever you did for one of the least of these…
you did for me. - Matthew 25:40

I’ll be honest. Occasionally but not often it sounds really good to leave everything in the complicated sprawl we call a city behind and go become a hermit. Not a literal hermit, but someone who moves into a farmhouse with a few acres near some mountains and lives a quiet life near a small town. I’d read, I’d write and let the quiet of the country dictate the pace of life. Occasionally it sounds good to quit trying to balance everything and everyone and just take care of myself. And usually about then, the Lord reminds me that there is work to be done beyond my own concern for comfort.

In October I went down to Oregon and ran the Portland Marathon. It was a goal I worked towards for many months, and it was fun (mostly!) to accomplish. The race began at 7 AM, so it was still dark when I and 5,000 of my closest friends started running.

Though it had rained the day before, this day was dry. Our route ran up the river a ways, turned and circled back before heading out of downtown and onto the distant part of the course. At each intersection and along the side of every street there were people cheering, people handing out water, people clapping, people playing music. So as day dawned and I saw a large group of people on my right next to a cement wall, I assumed it was more people cheering us on. It wasn’t.

In the slight shelter of the overhanging freeway onramp, were at least 50 people…just waking up. They were almost all men with moldy sleeping bags, ragged shirts, urine-soaked pants and dirty plastic tarps. Bottles littered the breezeway. They stared at us like we were people from another planet. And really, we were: high-tech outdoor running gear, $100 designer shoes, iPods and headphones, bodies honed by good food and the leisure of time to exercise.

I felt a little sheepish thinking that these things, symbols of my year-long goal, only served to accentuate the difference between me and these people on the street. I thought about it for a mile. Then several more miles.

It gradually sank in that any difference I perceived between myself and the homeless men was pretty shallow. They were people absolutely loved and valued by God, the same God I believed in. The stories of brokenness and discrimination and mental illness that plagued them surely broke His heart. There was no difference between me and them in God’s eyes. Perhaps they understood more consistently that they needed help while I was mired in the muck of taking care of myself.

Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. - Hebrews 13:3

We’re entering into Lent, a season when we try to focus our reflection and meditation on several things: our lives, our sin, our Lord. We rehearse the life, the passion, the arrest and death of Jesus.

It will be hard to miss that in general Jesus wrote off those who were full of themselves and powerful, but warmly embraced the needy and powerless. It will be hard to miss that Jesus did not just come to earth, but came with purpose: to save us from ourselves, from sin, from meaningless existence. And it will be hard to miss that Jesus came full of compassion for broken people and calls us into all sorts of places to share exactly that. It’s the work we get to do.

"Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” - Frederick Buechner

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the good things of the life God has placed us in…unless they make us forget that we have work to do. There’s nothing wrong with taking care of ourselves. And sometimes people are called to more isolated settings. But most of us are called to enter into the lives of people staring us in the face. Enter in.