A Front Row Seat to Brokenness

I have to admit...there are times where my Christianity does feel like a straitjacket. There are times when holiness is hard, purity is lonely, and self-control feels boring. Last night was one of those times.

It seemed like everybody in town was partying. I was lonely. I felt left out. I felt boring. It would be so much easier to just go out and have a “good time” like everybody else.

After a couple hours of distracting myself on email and facebook at dunkin donuts (which was quite unproductive due to the heavy weight of temptation which seemed to be assaulting me mentally), I went home to discover there was a party across the hall from my apartment. Temptation just doesn't let up sometimes!

I read my Bible for awhile, then talked to my brother on the phone for awhile. I was feeling better after that. By this point the it was 1:00am and the party was still going strong nextdoor. There was not much hope of getting to sleep so I ate a bowl of cereal and tried to distract myself by reading.

Then I started hearing conversations, arguments and fights from the hallway. I went over to the peep-hole in my door and began watching the reality show going on in my hallway. Relationships were crumbling. Friends were being betrayed. One guy called another guy to tell him his girlfriend was making out with some other guy. I heard another girl crying in the hall, saying that she had paid for her best friend to have an abortion-- through tears she exclaimed that had “paid to kill her friend's baby.” Not only was she distraught about the fact that she had paid for an abortion, but now that friend was sleeping with the guy that she was in love with. I heard drunk friends counseling drunk friends...and their advice was empty, and sometimes absurd. It was literally “the blind leading the blind.”

After stepping out of my apartment to ask some people to stop smoking right outside my door, and to investigate two fights that sounded like they were about to erupt in my hallway (one in each stairwell), I met a couple guys who were quite talkative (typical of drunks, I suppose). They said they were starving, so I offered them a box of Ritz crackers...and was treated like a superstar after that. One of the guys, who seemed to be kind a social leader in the group (and also quite sober...comparatively speaking), became my tour guide, leading me through the alcohol-drenched apartment, and introducing me to several people, including 3 of my neighbors.

As we walked around, I overheard more drama, witnessed girls throwing themselves around, and saw guys taking advantage of them. Then it dawned on me-- “I have a front-row seat to brokenness right now. I am not the one wearing the straitjacket-- they are. I don't need what they have-- they need what I have.”

Oh, to see the light of Christ break into the lives of these broken people!-- that the girl who paid for an abortion would experience the forgiveness found in only in Jesus Christ!--that these boys would become men, who love God, and as a result respect the women in their lives--that these girls would become women who do not find there value in the attention of a guy, but rather in a savior who truly loves them and will never fail them—that friends would no longer fight and betray, but would “bear each other's burdens,”-- that my confident tour-guide buddy would some day use his people skills and influence to lead people to Jesus.

Oh God, forgive me for being duped by the “deceitfulness of sin,” for envying the “freedom” of sinners....for viewing your great salvation as a burden. Fill my heart with compassion for my new friends and neighbors, who are lost and broken. Make me an ambassador of the freedom and joy that is found only in you.