CRASHPaul Louis Metzger

The Most Desirable Place to Live?

• LA—Crash?

• St. Paul, Minnesota—Nice?

• Portland—Cool?

• The City of God—Love.

It has been said…

In the South, they don’t care how close you get, but how high you get.

• In the North, they don’t care how high you get, but how close you get.

• The South loves the person, not the race.

• The North loves the race, not the person.

From Crashing to Touching

• Intolerance?

• Indifference?

• Infatuation?

• Intimacy.

Tolerance and Love

• “I would rather be loved than tolerated.”

• God does not simply tolerate us. God loves us.

• The Bible does not say, “For God so tolerated the world that he chose not to give his one and only Son….”

• The Bible does say, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son….” (John 3:16)

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

“If you can learn a simple trick, . . . you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

—Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird

How Then Shall We Believe and Bear Witness?

• By Crashing into Others?

• Or by Coming Close and Touching Them?

“Henri Nouwen defines 'community' as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.  Often we surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or a clique, not a community.  Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.”

– Philip Yancey

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:20-23).

The Sense of Touch