I once heard this elderly wise man say that no one is balanced in their theology.  And, he added, if anyone seems to be balanced, they just happen to be passing through the middle at the moment on their way to the other extreme.

Howard Hendricks said that.  A smart (imbalanced) man.

I grew up in an all-white mostly middle-class to affluent church in the heart of a largely African-American and hispanic neighborhood.  Most of us were admittedly indifferent to those with needs around us.  Others of us were outright afraid of them. In one business one such woman stood and announced that she didn’t want the neighborhood seeping into our church.  “I come to church,” she said, “to be with people like me.”

I left for college a few months later and eventually started playing guitar at a childrens home in that town – mostly kids darker and rougher than the ones I grew up with.  Prostitutes, pimps, an arsonist, thieves, drug users, drug dealers, refugees from third world countries. People who weren’t, on the outside, “people like me.”

My theology began to shift.  I no longer saw people who needed help as unwilling to help themselves.  I no longer saw them as people who had nothing to teach me.  Most importantly, I no longer saw them as people I had to care for, but people I was privileged to care for – people I was privileged at times to have caring for me.

Somewhere around then I think I found the middle – or the closest thing to it I’ve ever known.  And I stayed there, or near there, for years.

Then I went to the third world.  I saw the worst and the best of humanity without anything to distract me from taking it all in.  My passion for the poor, the victimized and forgotten grew and, regrettably, so did my arrogance and bitterness.  Arrogant: Anytime I learn something not everyone knows, I’m tempted like the Corinthians to think more of myself and less of you.  Bitter: Toward Christians like that woman who stood to keep the poor out of God’s house all those years ago.  Ever since that first trip, I’ve fought passing from the middle on to another extreme.  And I’ve lost that fight too often.

Thankfully, God is always pulling me back toward center – even when my heels are dug in deep.

One man he’s used to tug at me more than any other is Henri Nouwen.  He was a theologian and professor at a prestigious university until he left his post to care for the mentally and physically disabled at a “home.” There, he bathed and read to people without the intellectual capacity to admire his academic accomplishments, without the capacity to understand how much prestige he had sacrificed in order to spend his life cutting other people’s food and folding other people’s laundry.  He was often a servant to people who were unaware they were being served and were unable to thank him for it.

Could anyone be more like Jesus?

Yet I don’t see any self-righteousness in his words.  No pride. There’s no animosity toward the apathetic either.  No fingers pointed.  No sense that he feels he’s sacrificed anything at all. No exhaustion. Just satisfaction. And love. Lots of it.  The kind you’d expect to find in the middle.  These words of his are like bread crumbs to that place.

Perhaps we must continually remind ourselves that the first commandment requiring us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind is indeed the first.  I wonder if we really believe this.  It seems that in fact we live as if we should give as much of our heart, soul, and mind as possible to our fellow human beings, while trying not to forget God.  At least we feel that our attention should be divided evenly between God and our neighbor.  But Jesus’ claim is much more radical. He asks for a single-minded commitment to God and God alone.  God wants all of our heart, all of our mind, and all of our soul.  It is this unconditional and unreserved love for God that leads to the care of our neighbor, not as an activity that distracts us from God or competes with our attention to God, but as an expression of our love for God… We might even say that only in God does our neighbor become a neighbor rather than an infringement upon our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible.