Frequently while blogging I will begin to write a post, but then I’ll get distracted or my attention would be drawn to something else and I would never finish writing it. So, tonight I was digging through the saved drafts on my blog and came across the post I originally started writing after New Year’s this year. I quoted one paragraph in another post I made, so some of it might sound familiar. I also added the second last paragraph:
I was walking out of Red Wood after midnight, I think it was around 1:30, and I heard this really loud yelling match coming from the apartment house across the parking lot. It sounded almost like twenty people were involved. I stood in the parking lot for a while and listened to the shouts and screams. From where I stood it sounded beautiful, everyone yelling, it was like a symphony celebrating the fact people are capable of feeling and getting hurt. Although, I’m sure that if you were in the pit, it would be hell.
I don’t know too much about bars and parties, besides what my friends tell me. Just the other day I was talking to someone who just moved to town to attend the college, and she asked my sister-in-law what she thought about the local bar scene. My sister-in-law couldn’t really say much because she wasn’t brought up in the bar culture so she never hung out in them (and she isn’t from Thunder Bay). However, even though I was brought up just like my sister-in-law, I made a comment to this person that I knew quite a bit about the local bar scene from my friends–you learn a lot when you listen to people. I also know how people smuggle marijuana across the country, which I also learned from listening.
Anyway, there are countless times when I’m at school with friends, and they will tell me about their weekend. Frequently, it’s something like: bar, drunk, wasted… Getting hair pulled out by fifteen year old girls, and pop thrown everywhere… I honestly don’t mind listening to them tell me about their weekends, but the problem is that I don’t have much to say back. Sometimes this makes people feel awkward, sometimes it makes me feel awkward.
There are the times were you feel like you’re being portrayed as simply the fundamentalist Christian. I feel this when I have to say the words, “I don’t drink.” Let me make it clear that I’m not bothered because I could be missing out. I’m bothered because of the impression of Jesus this leaves on people. I don’t follow a system of rules or laws, but Christ himself.
The impression of Jesus I think I would like to leave is: if you saw Christ walking on the street today, you would be following him because he is nothing like us.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think a party is a place we go to with some kind of expectation. Jesus was known for being a person who partied a lot, and the Pharisees would attack him for that. I know that a lot of us love this aspect of Jesus, the partying saviour who turned water into wine, the best wine too. But I don’t think Jesus went to parties for himself. He didn’t have expectations for selfish gain. He was there for others, for the broken people around him, the sick people, the sinners… not for the healthy people, but for the sick who need healing. The people who knew they needed a saviour. Jesus did not seek for others to love him, but to love others. He would comfort those weary of hearing the same symphony over and over again.
And for what it’s worth, I doubt Jesus would have a gotten drunk, even though the people around him may have gotten drunk. Unlike any of us, he did not sin. He was attracted to the beauty of the symphony.
When I got home that night from Red Wood, something interesting happened to me. Apparently my neighbour was having a party, so when I parked my van in my driveway and got out, I saw a couple of teenagers walking by the road. One of them comes up to me and asks me if it would be possible that I could give him a ride home. He wasn’t drunk or anything, but just really needed to get home. So I gave him a ride home, and his four other friends. He paid me ten dollars because he was really thankful. His friends were wondering why a stranger would give them a ride home, but the guy who asked me and myself just told them that we were cousins, and we had a fun time playing on that for the whole drive (it was a funny coincedence that we both had the same last name). Of course during the drive he asked me what I did for New Year’s, and I told him that I was at Red Wood Park Church, and since he asked I told him about Plunge too.
I think Jesus would be a taxi driver.
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