The Unimportant Person

She found herself hesitating to leave at the end of the service because she wanted to get all she could out of being there before being asked to leave, or just bolting out of there back to her life. When she decided to get up and leave, the foyer was very busy and it took some effort and much discomfort walking alone through the crowd of cheerful people. She finally did escape, and as she walked toward her "home," a young teenage girl noticed the color of her dress, and interrupted her father asking him who that was walking away, as she had never seen her before. He glanced quickly, finished up his conversation, then looked more intently as she exited the parking lot. As this family was driving home in the same direction as the girl, they noticed her going into the bushes a couple blocks away in her dress.

This family just happened to be a quite wealthy family who regularly took in foster kids who were preparing for independent living when they turned 18. The father had also helped finance a low-cost building project for the homeless in a nearby city. The following Saturday morning, this family went in search of this girl as their curiosity had increased over the week. The dad went into the bushes, where he saw her enter the previous Sunday, and saw her sleeping there with an old blanket over her and her Bible sitting open beside her. He didn’t want to startle her, so he gently kept saying hello from a distance until she finally woke. Before anything else was said, he quickly asked her if she had come to their church the previous week. This sort of lowered her anxiety, and she hesitantly said yes.

The dad ended up putting her in a motel for the night, and the mom gave her some nice clothes and some makeup from home. Sunday morning they picked her up--of course she had been ready for hours. When they saw her, they could barely recognize her because of the difference. Now she got to go to church like everyone else.

After church that Sunday the family took her out for lunch, and by the end of it, they had invited the girl to come live with them, kind of like an adult foster kid, I guess. Within a year, she enrolled and was very successful in Bible college, …. Today she is living on her own and is the children’s ministry director of an even larger church in that community, which has a huge outreach program for homeless people that she helped initiate. (From Homeless to Home, Sean Harder, www.sermoncentral.com, Illustrations)

Friends, is that not a picture of what Jesus was doing at the well as He entered into the life, the pain, the reality, the despair, the hope of the Samaritan woman? Is it not a picture of the love with which Christ as loved us – a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God? Is it not a picture of how God can use our lives to touch the lives of those that world would call “unimportant?”

There is a second truth that we need to be aware of. People Are Spiritually Lost. In our society today people are not necessarily opposed to spirituality. On the contrary the next time you go into a bookstore take a look at the shelves of material relating to spirituality. There are hundreds of books being published every year on the subject of spirituality and most of them aren’t Christian books. There is an openness to spirituality these days that we need to be aware of. In some ways this openness is a double-edged sword. It permits us the opportunity to share God’s word, but on the other hand people no longer like to think in black and white opposites. Many are willing to accept God’s word as a good moral stance, but shy away from seeing Jesus as the only way. They wander from religion to religion, from cult to cult, and eventually decide on their own version of spirituality picking and choosing the elements they like from each one they have investigated.