the loony tune and the pastor - a true story



i thought yesterday was exciting! today a lunatic comes in to the office and threatens to hurt and kill everyone unless we help him. i get pulled from my interesting commentary on genesis and am face to face with a guy who is yelling at me that he is about to hurt someone.

i tell him to sit down and that he can't talk like that. finally i convince him to walk to the hospital next door with me. we get there and i tell him to sit down. i go over and talk to the nurse and explain the situation. she talks to him and looks up his chart. he has attempted suicide in the past and been prescribed atavan. she agrees to get him some atavan. he gets admitted but its going to be about an hour.

so we go for a walk and i try to calm him down some more. finally we go back to the hospital. i explain to him that we want to help him at the church but he can't talk to people the way he was before. he agrees. i pray with him and then tell him i have to go back to work.

i return to my commentary at my desk resentful of the fact that i've lost an hour of sermon prep time. (how selfish!)

i stay an extra hour at work and then go back to the hospital to see what happened. i talk to the same nurse and she says that the guy got belligerent, so he was physically thrown out by security.

right now he is probably wandering the streets yelling and threatening people - maybe he even assaulted someone.

and me, i'm back in my beautiful apt. with the million dollar view eating ben and jerry's and watching house. and then i'm going to enjoy a glass of merlot and read a little bit of a tale of 2 cities.

the question that haunts me is why do i deserve this life of comfort and why did he get such a raw deal that drove him to such anti-social behaviour?

the only answer i can come up with is God's grace - I don't deserve any of these gifts but God was gracious to me.

I can only assume that my friend has either rejected God's grace at some point or has been so badly damaged that he is presently unable to process grace properly.

Pray for him tonight.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Totally intriguing story.

Keep writing this blog, man.

People are reading it EVERY DAY.
9:28 PM
Anonymous said…
I am somewhat troubled by your story, as I wonder if the difference can be equated to grace alone. Is it grace?

Not knowing your story, I cannot say, but I deal with people like him regularly, and almost always there is a combination of traumatic history, mental illness, substance abuse, etc.- factors that are an intricately complex web of personal free will, societal injustices and inequities, and just plain bad luck.

For me, my comforts are not largely grace, but privileges stolen at the expense of others by ride the comfortable wave of a consumerist, "survival of the fittest" reality, where I had the luck/blessing/chance to be born into a stable family.

Please don't see this as judgment of you, but rather a continued dissatisfaction with the way we seem to see and engage a broken world.

Peace,
Jamie
9:34 PM
Anonymous said…
God's grace... I don't buy that. I'd sooner blame original sin (as hollow as that is) or the apathy of society. Perhaps we were all created to suffer and some people have the courage to rebel against nature.
11:19 PM
Santosh said…
i think it is a combination of things. my observation that it is just grace is too simplistic. the problem's in this man's life are probably a combination of those factos that jamie listed.

but i also believe everything good in my life is a by-product of god's grace in my life.

i think that the engagement of these societal problems such as addiction and mental illness should be a long term commitment by the church - but it is too much work so we focus on new worship songs or renovating kitchens instead.
11:35 PM
Anonymous said…
Well said, Santosh. Let's do something different. Thanks for hearing the heart of my comment, as I didn't want to sound harsh.

Peace,
Jamie
10:24 AM
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