They Called Him Grandpa

His eyes shined with tears when he said, “This church is everything to me.”

Just months earlier, his family left him for dead by the river. His sickness became a burden they could no longer bear. As his body wasted away from illness, they made the decision to leave him to his end and walk away.

I can’t imagine what that would feel like. First, to know you’re a burden and probably be told multiple times or to hear the whispers as your family worries about how to take care of you … the guilt would overwhelm me.

Then to be left, and to not completely blame them because you know it was hard … but to be lying on the ground without the ability to move yourself very far while your body deteriorates from its disease. Waiting to die.

But as though emerging from the parable of the Good Samaritan, someone from a local church found him there.

They brought him to the church, cleaned him, and gave him a place to rest. What’s more is the church then gave of their money to buy medicine to heal him.

I met him months later inside this little church in the mountains of South Asia where he now lived. His bed was above our heads in an area that I thought looked more like a hay loft than a bedroom … but for him, it was home.

For him, it meant life. For him, it meant a new family that wouldn’t abandon him on earth or in heaven.

That night as we drove down the mountain, I remembered the times in my life that I needed help.

When I was young, hard times meant you hide. You stay away until you can bootstrap yourself back to an “acceptable” place.

In my adulthood, when we went through a financial challenge — we asked for prayer but not for much else. Okay, anything else. Whether it was pride or fear or both, we didn’t want to seem vulnerable.

And to be honest, I don’t think at that point I had given much either. I didn’t want to offend anyone else’s pride, and I didn’t want to set a precedent for giving that went beyond what I could bear.

It all changed in my heart and mind after that night with “Grandpa.” I suddenly knew what it looked like when the early church had “all things in common.”

And I also wondered how I got to the place that I didn’t know how to ask for help or when I started worrying about what asking for help meant about me or my relationship to the person giving.

Yet I assumed that if someone needed help they would ask, as though I was the only one steeped in the bootstrap culture and a “God helps those who help themselves” mentality.

But what if the way God most wanted to provide for us is through each other?

I realized that I hadn’t been in a place so vulnerable that I couldn’t help myself or do anything to change my circumstance. Who was I denying the opportunity to use their gifts or love to support me when I needed it?

It also made me realize that maybe my eyes weren’t open enough to the vulnerable around me in ANY environment. Who was I withholding the gospel from because it was inconvenient? Because I didn’t wanna break into my errands and routines? Because it might cost me time, money, and energy to do so?

I didn’t really know what it meant to take my role in the Body of Christ seriously. I am a piece of a complex system of people that makes a whole. That I have responsibility to give radically, but also to receive radically.

To empty myself out in order to receive. To depend on others so deeply that I am connected to them for life. To know that what I have to offer, someone needs. And what I need, someone has it to offer … without expectation or guilt.

How would we look different from culture if we did?

How often has God provided and how often has that been through the prayers or provision of those around us?

What if the whole idea is to be uncomfortable enough to need each other and that discomfort comes from giving more than is comfortable to rely on the power of the Spirit within us to meet our needs and the needs of our community?

For Grandpa, one person going out of their way to give made a difference in his life on earth and in heaven, and it rippled out into the community … the story of how these crazy Jesus people saved a man — when they didn’t have to and couldn’t afford to.

We need each other. We were made that way. Or at least, I need you — though it pains me to say it out loud.

Vulnerability can be strength when we allow the Spirit and the people of God to help us. And I think it’s the way forward if we want others to someday say, like Grandpa, “This church is everything to me.”