The River Church Community

bLoG2:

This week I went north up First Street to meet my neighbors.  Specifically, I focused on one cluster of businesses: the carpet company and the three story run down building next to it which is populated with tons of many tiny businesses.  The carpet guys were quite nice and artfully tattooed (to be honest I was slightly jealous.  I have always wanted a tattoo but have decided against it in case God calls me to live in third world…but anyway).

Next I visited a little dry-cleaning business run by a wonderfully kind Vietnamese man who attends Saint Joseph’s basilica downtown.  And up and up I went into the three-story building.  As I ascended, I felt the spiritual weight of the place grow heavier and heavier.  Have you even been in a place that just seems a little depressing?  This is what it felt like.  Using more charismatic vocabulary, it felt like there was a spirit of despair.

One office in particular stood out to me as a particularly sad place.   I explained to the man that I was a pastor at the church on the corner and that I was going around meeting my neighbors etc…and his first response was something like this: “I don’t attend church.  I don’t give money to the church.”  I tried to explain to him that I did not want his money and that I wasn’t handing out tracks.  I was merely trying to meet my neighbors.  Eventually, he offered me a chair and we chatted for a bit. 

For some reason, this interaction still affects me.  I can’t help but sense that there was something else affecting this man—more than his dimly lit apartment, more than his rather crass response would indicate.  I began to wonder whether there was a spiritual reality behind the obvious reality I perceived.   Do you ever wonder about these things?  Sometimes I wonder if this is what Paul was referring to when he wrote to the Ephesians: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”  The more I think about this man and his office, I am more and more certain that loving him as a neighbor may also involve opposing those powers—the one’s who affect him without his consent or awareness—those powers who do not want him to flourish.