LITMIR.BIZ

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gives us a glimpse into another realm. Into a better way. The way of God.

      She and her family have taken kids who were discarded because of their perceived lack of worth and said, “No, you are not to be rejected and turned away. We are going to love you as an equal, as a human, as one of us.”

      They show us how God loves us.

      They reflect the image. And when you see it lived out like this, you’re seeing heaven crash into earth.

      Instead of seeing labels like “handicapped,” “reject,” or “invalid,” Lil and her husband and her kids see only one label: “human.”22

      And so they have only one response: love.

      And it makes all the difference in heaven and earth.

      Which takes us back to something that happened during Colonel Gonin’s stay at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp:

      It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

      Because sometimes, the difference between heaven and hell may be a bit of lipstick.

CHAPTER TWO Sexy on the Inside

      Last year I was in Canada for a couple of days, staying in downtown Ottawa. When I got to my hotel, I noticed that there was a buzz about the lobby. Lots of people with cameras and lots of British accents.

      I got my key and took the elevator to my floor, and as I walked down the hall, the door of the room next to mine opened and a woman stepped out wearing a shirt with four words on it: “Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie.”

      Ah, yes, the Rolling Stones.

      With great passion, she told me that they were staying in this very hotel and that the concert was tomorrow night, only a mile from here.

      The next night, I went to the stadium and bought a single ticket from a man standing at the main gate. I found my seat and began talking with the couple next to me. At one point they asked what I do for a living. I told them that I’m a pastor.

      They looked at each other, stunned. They told me that they weren’t very religious or part of a church or anything like that, but on the way to the concert, they both had this unusual sense that there would be some sort of significance to whoever they ended up sitting next to that night.

      We discussed politics and the environment and literature and nuclear energy and music and family—all during the opening band. At one point the woman asked why the world was so broken and why people have such difficulty getting along. The question seemed to come from years of reflection. And it wasn’t just an intellectual issue; this was something that deeply troubled her soul. She pointed to the forty thousand people seated around us in the stadium and asked, “Why is it so hard for us to get along? Why do we have to fight with each other and go to war and hurt each other and sue each other and say horrible things about each other?”

      As she was saying this, I realized that what she was saying was less a series of questions and more of a lament. A grieving.

      We’re disconnected from each other, and we know it. It’s not how things are supposed to be. Even people who would say they have no faith in God or in any sort of higher being or supreme power still have a sense that there is a way things are supposed to be. And that way involves us as humans being connected with each other.

      I recently talked to a woman in our church whose husband has a history of physical abuse. She told me about the group of people who have come around her to help her through her pain. They’re helping her set boundaries so that she and her children are protected, offering her whatever they can in the way of resources and support.

      Several weeks after talking to her, a man walked up to me with tears in his eyes and told me that he had hit his wife and he wanted to get help so he could put his life and his marriage and his family back together.

      It was him.

      I asked him who he had to talk to about all of this, and he said he had no one. As I stood there looking at him, I had this sense that in this one man I was seeing what is missing with so many in our world. He was made for loving, connected relationships with others, but he’s cut off. Separated. Alone.

      But our disconnection isn’t just with each other.

      The Earth and Us

      My boys and I were at the beach recently searching for shells and unusual things that had floated to shore. We found a giant jellyfish (dead), hundreds of hermit crabs (alive), a baby shark (dead), and lots of starfish (which are alive but appear to be dead). We also found broken glass, pop cans, plastic bags, and candy wrappers, and at one point, when my boys ran ahead, I looked down and there at my feet was a used syringe.

      We’re disconnected from the earth. And we know it. Or at least we can feel it, even if we don’t have words for it.

      We have been given this responsibility to take care of our home, to carefully steward and order and manage it, and we’re in trouble. From oil to air to pollution to wetlands, we find ourselves in our bare feet on a beach, almost stepping on a needle.

      Notice the premise of many car commercials. How many of them deal in some way with getting out of the city and exploring nature? The makers of these commercials understand that we are alienated from the earth.

      Many people live in air-conditioned houses and apartments.

      We alter our air with electric machines.

      We spend vast sums of money and energy to change our air. And we drive in air-conditioned cars—the 8 percent of us in the world who have cars—to air-conditioned schools and offices and stores with tile floors and fluorescent lights.

      It’s even possible to go days without spending any significant time outside.

      And it’s still considered living.

      It’s easy to go for weeks and maybe even years without ever actually plunging your hands into soil. Into earth. Into dirt.

      But this car— this is the one, the one with the space for my cooler and the kayak that I don’t own. This is the car that will change things.

      Massive amounts of money are spent convincing us that this particular automobile will give us access to the mountains, streams, and deserts that we are unable to access at this moment. And when we make that trip, in that car, the one from the commercial, we will be connected with the earth. With our home.

      We see this disconnection in the relationship between our sleep patterns and the invention of electricity.1 Prior to the lightbulb, people generally went to bed when the sun went down and woke up when the sun came up. With the invention of electric light, sleep habits became less and less regulated by the rising and setting of the sun. As a result, people today get far fewer hours of sleep a night than people did a hundred or two hundred years ago. We even have third-shift jobs in which a person works through the night while it’s dark, and then sleeps through the day while it’s light. All of this affects our connection with nature. Where once the rhythm and flow of life were dictated by the rhythm and flow of the earth, we now live relatively independent of these forces.

      There’s

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