touch of the God of all comfort and He was not letting us down! We felt His presence in each hug offered and received, with each tearful glance and in the prayers we had together. In the midst of this injustice, Jesus was right there, suffering with us. Somehow, there was peace in the midst of all this craziness because we knew that though God was not responsible for the actions of the murderers, He was not absent from our dilemma. The horrible, sinful actions performed by the few cannot stop God from making beautiful things happen. God’s kingdom is still being fully established. He was present in it all.
Later that night, I went home and began preparing for crisis counselling for our staff and the children whom Patrick served. They needed it and so did I. It was a hard night. My own children were traumatized and had nightmares (this continued for months afterwards) that a bad man would break into our house and murder us in our sleep. After a restless night, I arrived, bright and early, back at the community centre and was greeted at the door by the media. The place was crawling with cameras, reporters and huge television network vans with satellite dishes on their roofs. As I brushed them aside and made my way into the centre, I heard a teenager utter the following words, while pointing angrily at the media throng:
“Why are they always here when something bad happens? Why are they not here when all the good stuff occurs like when one of us graduates from school? They should have been here a long time ago, doing a story on Patrick, a good story, instead of this one.”
I remember talking to the media later in the day and asked them why they never seemed to report on the many good news stories that took place on a regular basis in our communities. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response. I was told that there is far more bad news taking place than good in our city, and therefore the media report only what they see. “How sad!” I replied. “You are blind because you do not see that there are far more good news stories out here than bad. You are so blind to goodness that all you can see is evil.”
How do you see goodness? Love. Love provides true 20/20 vision because it tends to see things differently. Love sees the truth. Love sees the good news stories in spite of the bad.
I remember hearing Dr. Tony Campolo, founder of UrbanPromise, telling a story of his teaching days at the University of Pennsylvania where he was a professor of sociology. During one of his lectures, Tony made reference to Jesus’ ministry to prostitutes. It was then that he was challenged by one of his students, who curtly disrupted the lecture by proclaiming that Jesus never saw a prostitute in His entire life. Tony, rather agitated by this young man’s audacity to not only interrupt his teaching but also challenge his intellect, took on the young man in front of the class and began to share Scripture that showed Jesus’ ministry of compassion to prostitutes. Tony was experiencing enormous satisfaction as he ripped into this pretentious student, defending the faith while impressing his students with his great knowledge.
When he was finished with the student, he knew he had won the argument and saved the day for the cause of Christ. His reputation was intact and his respect level with the students had risen with each word that left his scholarly tongue. Tony smirked smugly, knowing that he had proved that Jesus saw not just one, but many prostitutes in His day. However, the tables were quickly turned and Tony was left speechless when the student replied, “Dr. Campolo, you see a prostitute in those Bible passages you just read. The people who were with Jesus in the Scriptures you shared also saw Jesus hanging out with prostitutes. To you and them, all you see are whores. But do you really think Jesus saw them that way? Do you think Jesus saw them as whores or two-bit prostitutes? When Jesus looked into the eyes of a prostitute, do you really think He saw a prostitute or did He see a beautiful child of God?”
Ouch! This student was not only bold, he was right and Tony knew it. It was true. Jesus never saw prostitutes, He only saw children of God. Jesus, walking on the streets of our cities today, does not see bums, winos, hookers, drug addicts or gangbangers. He sees His created children, His brothers and sisters, His lost sheep. He sees God’s beauty marks all over each hurting, marginalized or so-called successful person His eyes come across. Love sees things differently.
The Jewish mystics teach us well about this concept of sight that is only made available through love. There is a story1 they tell to describe the glory of God. These mystics viewed God’s shekina (Hebrew for glory) as the wife of God. They taught that at creation, God and his shekina were united in close harmony. All of creation beamed with the shekina glory of God. However, after the Fall of mankind, when sin entered the world, His shekina was disturbed. God was separated from it and it was imprisoned inside the fallen creation. The question then is: How does God reunite with his shekina? The answer of the mystics is that shekina is freed through the deeds of the righteous. Righteous people are God’s instruments that can release and free the shekina imprisoned in creation by their virtuous acts.
In other words, God’s glory, His shekina, is all around us, entrapped in every created and living thing. Our lives then become an exciting adventure of freeing up God’s glory through our acts of kindness. In this way, love sees things differently. This is why I cannot help but see shekina all around me as I walk the streets of the communities in which we work, neighbourhoods that others have labelled dark and dangerous. I see God’s wonderful glory present, just waiting to burst out all around me. God’s shekina is on the streets of your city too, if you choose to look at it with the eyes of Jesus—with eyes of love. It is present in the form of a homeless youth who begs for spare change. It is active in the hands of the crack addict who places a quarter in his cup. It manifests itself in the businessman’s smile as he places a $20 bill in the same beggar’s cup. It is heard in the voice of the beggar who responds by saying, “Thank you for your kindness.”
The wisdom of Proverbs teaches us some very interesting truths about the importance of seeing. In Proverbs 11:27, we read: “He who seeks good finds goodwill, but evil comes to him who searches for it” (NIV).
The lesson here is simple and yet profound. Goodness and evil are empowered according to how much they are sought out and desired. If you seek out goodness, you will find it and in return will receive it in ongoing abundance in your life. The opposite is also true. If all you seek is evil, then evil is what you will find—it will increase. The more evil we speak about, the more evil we tend to see we will eventually emulate. In the neighbourhoods where we are active, the lie of evil is so strong that many young people actually tend to believe that evil is good and good is evil. Goodness has become archaic and unpractical, and the code of the streets is that if you are not evil, then someone will take advantage of you. The only way to survive is to be more evil than the next person. Thus the old saying “Only the good die young” becomes a reality. This problem multiplies quickly in our society when you consider the influence of the media via print, television and radio that seeks evil to broadcast. If it is true that evil sells papers, then we are in big trouble. Evil has great PR, and it results in people being afraid and feeling hopeless. When this happens, life becomes a game of self-survival by all means necessary and selfishness is the epitome of evil.
The solution to this mess is to have proper eyesight. The Church must be involved in our city, seeing God’s shekina that just waits to be loosed from the shackles of evil. The Church must have Jesus’ eyes to see it. It must also understand it is uniquely gifted for this endeavour. The writer of Proverbs continues to give us more insight on this topic of goodness and evil:
“With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbour but through knowledge the righteous escape. Through the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is destroyed. A man who lacks judgement derides his neighbour, but a man of understanding holds his tongue.” (Proverbs 11:9,11,12, NIV)
These verses of wisdom tell us that the social, moral and spiritual health of our cities and neighbourhoods is based on what the upright, in comparison to the godless, are doing. More directly, the welfare of our cities rests on how the upright see the city. God is present all around us and with true godly understanding one can see His presence in the
