In Response to "Bearing Witness: Seeing as a Form of Service"

I always tell people that I was born to live in a small town. I believe in communities that are tight-knit and face to face. However, it is hard for me to backup my words with my actions. Today I went to the pharmacy in the town I grew up in. While I was there, I had to make small talk with multiple pharmacists, an elderly couple waiting for the medications, and an old substitute teacher I knew from my time in high school. All of this was too much for me. It was exhausting to have these conversations with people who mattered in the moment, but in my own long term, were irrelevant.

All this makes me sound like a millennial. It makes me mad that I fit that mold so well. In my heart of hearts, I believe that all people inherently matter. I also believe that God is using the people around us to shape us, just as we are being used to shape them. Even the smallest of interactions can truly matter. This is beautiful, but living it out is hard, exhausting, and can even become an idol when we prioritize our own presence over God's presence in our daily interactions with our neighbors.

How should we value the image of God that is found in ourselves and others, not for the image itself, but for God's presence with us? I think it looks like acting as a witness to both God and man. The first person to introduce this way of living to me was one of my favorite professors, Dr. Dunn. She wrote a piece about bearing witness to others and avoiding the reflex to swoop in and save the day.

I have come back to this piece many times since I discovered it a year ago.

I read last spring break, with my small group of students as we have explored the city of Santa Barbara. We focused on making eye contact and bearing witness to the lives of people experiencing homelessness in Santa Barbara. We weren't there to save them, we were just there to be humans in the same environment as them.

I read it this summer when I came home to make money before I traveled. I was working in some pretty soul numbing spaces. One of my places of joy was getting to go visit and help out at the youth group I grew up in. One night, a boy gave his testimony at youth group. He told us about how God speaks to him. God knows him better than anyone else because God has known him through everything that he has gone through. This boy knew God loved him. He told us that God wants us to know, pray for, and love others.  He told us about how he had answered God's call to see someone in need at school. He saw her crying and sat down with her. He told her it was alright to cry and even told us that despite his tough exterior, he cries too. With his vulnerable sweetness, it was hard to not feel challenged to do the same. His testimony was low key heretical, but beneath the technicalities, there was so much truth. This high school boy was preaching the word as best he could. He had a hospitable heart towards us and allowed us into his world even though he knew it wasn't cleaned up. After this boy spoke, I went home and read this article. I was a short-timer at work and at home. I knew I didn't have time to build relationship like I wanted to, but I could bear witness to others.

I read it with my team as we were in Malaysia & Thailand this summer. It was hard for us to see painful situations, especially on the streets of Bangkok, where local and international women were being approached by men from the United States and Britain for companionship and more. Bearing Witness became our focus because we knew that anything we did in a week would not be helpful, and could even hurt the people we were there to love. Instead, we focused on seeing the women we passed as humans and not as objects of pleasure. When we got the chance, we looked them in the eyes and smiled.

I think that the Kingdom of God is going to be a lot like a small town. If so, we all could use a little more practice living amongst others and seeing them as they are. Here are some resources that might help us wrap our minds around knowing, loving, and praying for others better and give us ideas on how to do that and where we can live this out.

Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTt8yU9bsiE&list=PL5_wpo9KEi9c7fbGaC0rYQkK1X8kkxxL8&index=2.