Recently I was challenged by the another quote from Frances Chans' book, Crazy Love. He asked the question, "How would my life change if I actually thought of each person I came into contact with as "Christ." ie the person driving painfully slow person in front of me, the checker at the grocery store who seems more interested in chatting than ringing up my groceries, the member of own family with whom I can’t seem to have a conversation and not get annoyed?" That in essence is the way Jesus wants us to see people, Matthew 25:37-40.
I was actually tested with that this week when I went to see a man in prison. I was waiting in the foyer to see him when they released a man who had been in overnight. They escorted him through the foyer and out the door. Then almost immediately after he left they building, a lady came out with a spray bottle trying to deodorizer every where he had been. He did smell but more than that, he was extremely unkept, unshaven, a bit crippled and elderly. Much to their dismay and a bit to mine he came back in the building and sat down across from me. To be honest I didn't want to talk to him, cause I didn't know what to say. I almost said something about his shoes. They were bright orange slip-on tennis shoes. They reminded me of the soccer shoes some of the World Cup players are wearing so I thought they were sort of cool. I'm glad I didn't say anything though because in the course of the conversation he told me that that they were prison shoes. They had given them to him because he didn't have any of his own. As it turned out he was not only shoeless but homeless too.
I didn't do anything for him, except talk to him. In the end I was convicted as to how I see people who "hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison" Do I see them as a nuisance or as if they were Jesus? Jesus would want me to see them as if they were Him and give them food because they are hungry, water because they are thirsty and something to wear (even if it was orange shoes) because they are naked.
