Shaving by iPod

One of the joys of writing is coming up with titles! For the past week I have been at The Falls Church in Washington DC, with a group of emerging Christian leaders exploring faith, culture and vocation. This was a very challenging time and I was greatly blessed by the presence of wise men of God, but also by the young men and women who represent India, China, the Middle-East, Africa, US and UK and whose work ranges from leading growing churches to translating and publishing Christian books in China!

A key theme that we kept coming back to was that of “story”. What is our story? Where do we fit into the life that surrounds us? What are the eternal consequences of our story? The more we discussed these matters the more I realised again how important the gospel is to our society. We know it has moral strength, is a guide to our behaviour and is the basis to much of our law. Yet the bible offers something far greater than this, it gives us all a story that we can be a part of. It is something to which we all belong, and in it we all find a narrative for our lives: that we were designed by the Father since before creation; that He knows us and has set our days before us; that we can live in relationship with Him and have purpose. We are part of the story of failure, grace and redemption. We are part of the story of restoration of the world around us by a loving God. I began to see that the hopelessness that we see around us in far deeper and more tragic than I imagined; that the secular, relativistic post-modern descriptions of life and truth only enable this lack of story, lack of belonging, lack of hope and again the gospel stands as the answer. And we must answer, for the lost will look for hope: in the New age, in religions of tight legal prescription, in drugs, acts of hatred – anything that can either offer a story or dull the hopelessness that lurks in their spirits.

But let me return to the title. Arriving at Heathrow at 7:00 am, waiting here for the day to fly out again, I showered at terminal 4 and discovered that an iPod touch’s mirrored back is a wonderful shaving mirror. And while in transition in Heathrow, I encountered the hate. Relaxed after my shower, sitting to drink a coffee, a man sat down at the nearby table and became angry at the political news detailing the latest comments by the major UK parties in the run-up to the UK elections. He began to swear prolifically. After a while I asked if he would mind not swearing, for the sake of all those around him. This provoked a fierce reaction and I spent the next ten minutes being harangued as a foreigner in his country, being blamed for Apartheid, Mandela’s imprisonment and a host of historical events. If he hadn’t been so angry the hypocrisy and appalling historical record would have been amusing. But this exchange raised two key issues for me. What was this man’s story? He was English, proud of this fact, but his story was one dominated by hatred, aimed at every foreigner that had come into and ruined “his” land. His story had a beginning (if somewhat mythic) but it was its end that worried me. I had spoken during the past week that a key part of Ephesus’ vision is to encourage the Christian community to help bring God’s love to the West, and in so doing, to deny efforts to use our faith and England’s Christian heritage as part of patriotic hatred against the “others” in the UK as well as other Western states. The Christian message of love, hope and redemption must be told in acts of service and encounters with God that bring people back into the eternal story to which they all have a right to belong. If we do not work to bring people into encounters with God, then we must not be surprised if our God is taken up by others who will fiercely misrepresent Him.

Interestingly, when I realised that this was not a man that could be reasoned with, I spoke gently and softly to him of honour, decency and courtesy – not for me, but for his shocked woman companion. He barked abuse again, but this appeared to rock him significantly as he very soon became quiet and left the restaurant. People came to me afterwards and apologised, saying “we are not all like him”. This was reassuring, but why were they so quiet, backs turned away, as he spurted forth his hatred? Do we as Christians do the same to the lost and hopeless all around us?