I met a man, a big burly guy. He was 78 and in a wheelchair. He was hard of hearing, and so used a big burly voice to talk with me. Harsh sounding. He was homely, unshaven, with one disfigured eye, the whites of which gazed at me through a slit.
His legs were useless, he said. He was trapped most of the time in this wheelchair. He was helpless in many ways, but said he and Jean were making it work.
And then he told me about the women he has loved: a wife who had died, another good woman he was living with, and when I asked him about his faith, he told me about his grandmother. "As a child," he said, "I went to her house almost every day before school or work." Now there was a tear in that disfigured eye. "She taught me about Jesus, and to read the Bible." His voice had become soft and gentle, as he remembered this love of his life. She died when I was 17. Now I had a tear in my eye.
As I reflect on this encounter, over and over again, I am reminded of Isaiah 53:2 where Isaiah is describing the coming suffering servant. "He had no beauty or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."
Lent is a time of reflection, a time to look at ourselves and seeing what is inside us. At the beginning of this encounter I just wanted to move on. I had no desire to really look at this man. But as I listened to his story he became real to me, and then he became an image bearer of God, as we all are. I recognized in myself the tendency to look for God in people who look like me, and this man was ,"the other."
"The Other" can be caused by many things: they may be from a different socioeconomic class, a different race, ethnicity, gender identity, value system, disfigurement, disability, etc. We gravitate to those "like us," and so are missing what God is doing in the world, and what he would love to do in our lives in so many ways. God calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, but how can we love them unless we get to know them? How can we understand them, unless it becomes a priority to expand our world and discover a little more about theirs? It takes effort.
I was also challenged to ask myself, when my grandchildren are 78 what do I want them to remember and cherish about me? Isn't is interesting, two challenges: One about how I interact with the world, and one about how I love my grandchildren?
