SPEAKER_00: This podcast is a ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about Grand Parkway, visit GrandParkway.org.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
SPEAKER_02: You'd be happy to know I took my earrings off.
SPEAKER_02: I had no idea what was going on.
SPEAKER_02: On a dark and early May morning in 2016, a text message from a neighbor came into my cell phone at 5 15 a.m.
SPEAKER_02: What's going on at Hank's house?
SPEAKER_02: Are you okay?
SPEAKER_02: But my phone was turned off and in the other room, and so I did not get the message.
SPEAKER_02: Peaceful sleep sounds echoed from the children's rooms.
SPEAKER_02: Even the dogs were sleeping.
SPEAKER_02: My Bible was open with my notebook in hand, and I started my devotions that morning as I have been doing for the past 20 years, and as Ken and Floyd Smith modeled for me, praying that the Lord would open my eyes to see wondrous things in his word.
SPEAKER_02: I typically intersperse prayer with Bible reading and note-taking, and in the morning I tend to pray in concentric circles.
SPEAKER_02: I start by confessing my sin, seeking deeper repentance, praying that the Lord would increase my love for him.
SPEAKER_02: I long for the Lord to grow me in holiness, to give me courage to proclaim Christ in word and deed as a living epistle, and to make me a more loving wife and mother and friend.
SPEAKER_02: I then pray for my family, the church, my neighbors, my nation, foreign missions, missionaries, and I thank the Lord that he is risen.
SPEAKER_02: I thank the Lord for the covenant of which I am a part.
SPEAKER_02: With notebook open and Bible open, I pray through names and situations.
SPEAKER_02: Well, that morning, my prayer time stopped at the concentric circle of neighbor.
SPEAKER_02: And I was praying for my immediate neighbor, Hank.
SPEAKER_02: A typical morning, except for the phone that was in the other room, continued to receive text messages alerting me that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong in the house across the street.
SPEAKER_02: The house of the man for whom I was praying.
SPEAKER_02: Our house and Hank's house share a dead end that stops where two acres of woods open up.
SPEAKER_02: When Hank's moving van first backed down the driveway in 2014, he was a self-described recluse.
SPEAKER_02: He worked in his yard digging ditches, these perfect concentric circles, for reasons no one knew.
SPEAKER_02: He played loud music.
SPEAKER_02: He occasionally received cell phone calls that got him fuming mad and shouting obscenities.
SPEAKER_02: So, truth be told, when Hank's moving van first parked in the driveway, he was not the neighbor that I had prayed for.
SPEAKER_02: But he was the neighbor that God gave us.
SPEAKER_02: Shortly after he moved in, we discovered that he had a dog.
SPEAKER_02: Not just any dog, but a 100-pound pit bull who ran the streets without collar or tags.
SPEAKER_02: Every neighbor that I know remembers seeing our life flash before our eyes the first time we met Tank.
SPEAKER_02: And then adding to that, Hank did not cut his lawn for three months.
SPEAKER_02: This is Durham, North Carolina.
SPEAKER_02: Lots of rain.
SPEAKER_02: In three months, your yard is a meadow.
SPEAKER_02: It's not a yard.
SPEAKER_02: No regular mower could tackle the cleanup job.
SPEAKER_02: By the time he was fined by the city, we couldn't even help him with that chore.
SPEAKER_02: So while Hank was not the guy we had prayed for, we trusted that Hank was the neighbor God had planned for us.
SPEAKER_02: Good neighboring is at the heart of the gospel I know.
SPEAKER_02: I shared with you last night.
SPEAKER_02: I came to Christ in no small part because I had a Christian neighbor who went to the ends of the earth to drag me into the kingdom.
SPEAKER_02: So we we tried to get to know Hank.
SPEAKER_02: You know, we we we brought the kids and the dogs, we had a little note card, our names, phone numbers, email, a little homemade loaf of bread, ding dong, red rang the ding, you know, rang the doorbell and introduced ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: And Hank waved and took the bread, and the next thing he did was dismantle his front doorbell.
SPEAKER_02: And I took that a little personally.
SPEAKER_02: I took it a little personally.
SPEAKER_02: So we we prayed for Hank, and gossip started to spring up in this neighborhood about this man who did not fit in here.
SPEAKER_02: And then one day Tank ran away.
SPEAKER_02: And one day turned into a night, and a night into a week.
SPEAKER_02: And many neighbors expressed profound relief, mostly on the next door app, that that large gray pit bull wasn't running the streets.
SPEAKER_02: I kind of kid around in our next door app, it's a social media app that organizes neighbors.
SPEAKER_02: You there are two phrases that come up almost daily: lost dog and damn dog.
SPEAKER_02: I'm it so anyway, I can just tell you that Tank's category was the latter, and people were relieved that he wasn't there.
SPEAKER_02: But in the crisis of a lost dog, one who was also the closest companion of a lonely man, the inkling of a friendship began.
SPEAKER_02: We went across the street and we offered to find Tank.
SPEAKER_02: We we posted all of his information on Nextdoor and every other place we could think of.
SPEAKER_02: And my 10-year-old daughter walked up to Hank and said, Mr.
SPEAKER_02: Hank, I'm I'm praying for Tank, and God's gonna hear my prayers.
SPEAKER_02: And then about a week later, Tank was finally found.
SPEAKER_02: And we became very fragile friends.
SPEAKER_02: Hank actually gave me his cell phone number and his email address, and he said, Rosaria, please don't abuse this.
SPEAKER_02: Eventually we were eating meals together, even spending holidays at our table and sharing life.
SPEAKER_02: Tank became almost like our dog, and um, and it was an unusual friendship, but it was a genuine friendship.
SPEAKER_02: We had many opportunities to share the gospel with Hank, and Hank had many opportunities to tell us what his life had been like.
SPEAKER_02: He had severe clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder from having served time in the military.
SPEAKER_02: He had actually lived as a homeless man prior to his mom buying the house across the street.
SPEAKER_02: Hank loved the woods as much as my children and I do.
SPEAKER_02: And as winter opened into spring, our households kept track of things.
SPEAKER_02: We kept tallies of our nesting red-shouldered hawks, our calling American toads, our migrating and returning robins, blue jays, woodpeckers, tohees, our ambling box turtles.
SPEAKER_02: Hank helped us chop down dead trees in our woods, always checking the trees for babies first.
SPEAKER_02: In his garage, he always had the knick-knack that I needed, a little flashlight for running at night, or a little hook that would help you hang on to your doggy bags.
SPEAKER_02: Hank was uneven, and we assumed that his depression made him so.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes he would stay secluded in his home for weeks, and the only sign of life was that his garbage can would go up to the front of the house on the designated day.
SPEAKER_02: And then Amy moved in about a month prior to this.
SPEAKER_02: Pink hair, twiggy, skinny.
SPEAKER_02: She wore the sunken eyes and the pocked skin and the manic unpredictability of a drug addict.
SPEAKER_02: As neighbors were texting my turned-off cell phone about commotion at Hank's house, I was sitting at my desk praying for my neighbors.
SPEAKER_02: And that's when I noticed it.
SPEAKER_02: Burley men ducking around the back of my house wearing orange shirts marked D E A, Drug Enforcement Agency.
SPEAKER_02: Serene morning darkness exploded with the unnatural intrusion of police lights.
SPEAKER_02: And then I saw it.
SPEAKER_02: Yellow tape marking a crime scene appeared everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: I left my Bible open to Psalm 42 and ran to get Kent.
SPEAKER_02: I grabbed my phone and I looked, and text messages started to bounce to life.
SPEAKER_02: What's going on at Hank's house?
SPEAKER_02: Is there really a meth lab across the street from you?
SPEAKER_02: So what does the conservative Bible-believing family who lives across the street from a meth lab do in a crisis like this?
SPEAKER_02: I will tell you, it's a bit of a spoiler alert, but I will tell you the first thing you do is you thank God for the modest pajamas you're wearing.
SPEAKER_02: You will never despise an LL bean coupon again.
SPEAKER_02: So that's one thing you do.
SPEAKER_02: But now I'll get to the serious stuff.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what should we do?
SPEAKER_02: How should we live?
SPEAKER_02: How should we think about this?
SPEAKER_02: Well, we could barrack ourselves in the house and remind ourselves and our children that evil company perverts.
SPEAKER_02: And like the good Pharisees that we are always poised to become, we could just thank God that we're not like those evil meth addicts.
SPEAKER_02: We could envelop our home in our own version of yellow crime scene tape, giving the message that we're just better than this.
SPEAKER_02: We make good choices.
SPEAKER_02: We would never fall into this mess.
SPEAKER_02: We could surround ourselves with fear.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what if the meth lab had exploded?
SPEAKER_02: They do that, you know.
SPEAKER_02: Our homes are pretty close together in Durham.
SPEAKER_02: The room closest to the meth lab was my daughter's bedroom.
SPEAKER_02: What if my daughter had been hurt or even killed?
SPEAKER_02: And we could berate ourselves with criticism.
SPEAKER_02: How could we have allowed this dangerous and unstable man into our hearts and into our home?
SPEAKER_02: But that, of course, is not what Jesus calls any of us to do.
SPEAKER_02: And so as neighbors filed into our front yard, which had become front row seating for an epic unfolding drama, I scrambled eggs, put on a big pot of coffee, set out every Bible in the house, opened the door, and invited them all in.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, who else but Bible-believing Christians can make redemptive sense of tragedy?
SPEAKER_02: Who else can see hope in the promises of God when the real lived experiences look so dire?
SPEAKER_02: Who else knows that the sin that will undo me is mine?
SPEAKER_02: Even when my neighbor's sin has crime scene tape wrapped around it.
SPEAKER_02: And where else would a Christian home should neighbors go to in times of unprecedented crisis?
SPEAKER_02: Where else is it safe to be vulnerable, lost, scared, helpless?
SPEAKER_02: If we close the door and draw the shades, how can we really teach our children to apply biblical faith to the hard facts of life?
SPEAKER_02: A process that cancels out neither reality, as it begs Jesus for help and hope and redemptive meaning and saving grace.
SPEAKER_02: If we were to lock the doors and numb ourselves through media intake or go into these remote monologues about how we always knew Hank was a bad man and we always make good choices, well, what legacy does that leave to our children?
SPEAKER_02: See, here's the thing about soothing yourself with self-delusion.
SPEAKER_02: The only body deluded is you.
SPEAKER_02: Everybody else sees through it.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I had other things to do on my list of things to do that day, but none more important than I what I was finding myself doing.
SPEAKER_02: Gathering in distraught neighbors, helping the children, mine and others, to process this, praying for my friends, Hank and Amy.
SPEAKER_02: And that's when I realized it.
SPEAKER_02: I didn't even know Amy's last name.
SPEAKER_02: Well, neighbors were quick to let the police know that we were Hank's only known friends and probably knew something about the meth lab.
SPEAKER_02: We provided them with Hank's mom's phone number.
SPEAKER_02: And one of the officers was a pit bull lover, and she said, pit bulls sprung from meth labs do not last long in the county pound.
SPEAKER_02: And so Kent, and this is always hilarious, Kent is not the animal lover.
SPEAKER_02: So he's somewhat the animal like neglector.
SPEAKER_02: So when he actually said this, it was shocking.
SPEAKER_02: Kent assured the police that we would take care of Tank for as long as was needed.
SPEAKER_02: Now, let me tell you, Tank is enormous.
SPEAKER_02: It's like living with a couch that moves.
SPEAKER_02: Okay?
SPEAKER_02: Like if I if I straddle over him and he's asleep and he stands up, I'm airborne.
SPEAKER_02: Well, the police were quick to tell Kent that that dog would be dead two times over before Hank was going to get out for this one.
SPEAKER_02: All morning our house was like a trauma center, with the DEA and other members of the police team using our kitchen and bathroom, and with neighbors coming in in a steady stream of concern, lament, and criticism.
SPEAKER_02: By one o'clock, the DEA told us that they were leaving to open the meth lab.
SPEAKER_02: That meant that they would open all the windows and all the doors and that the noxious toxins would be released into the air that we breathe.
SPEAKER_02: And we were all told to stay inside until 6 p.m.
SPEAKER_02: Especially given the proximity of our house to Hank's, the warning was stern.
SPEAKER_02: Well, quite frankly, I was relieved at that point because I thought all of you complaining neighbors are going to go home now.
SPEAKER_02: That's what you would think, right?
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_02: No, some did leave, but others stayed the afternoon inside with us.
SPEAKER_02: Grief and sadness and betrayal mingled with the tangled feeling of entrapment.
SPEAKER_02: My neighbors were fuming.
SPEAKER_02: Bill, pacing in my kitchen, finished up the last drop of coffee and turned to me and said, Rosaria, would you like to know the problem with you Christians?
SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, no, not really, but you're going to tell me.
SPEAKER_02: And he said, The problem with you Christians is you're so open-minded about people, your brains are falling out your ears.
SPEAKER_02: And I thought, oh, could you write that about me on social media?
SPEAKER_02: That could actually.
SPEAKER_02: You don't actually know who I am.
SPEAKER_02: I have this other life that would really benefit me.
SPEAKER_02: But it really takes a certain amount of spiritual gifting to have your neighbor finish the coffee and insult you in the same gulp.
SPEAKER_02: That is my spiritual gift.
SPEAKER_02: It never shows up on those little tests, those fill-in-the-blank ones.
SPEAKER_02: Sissy, a wholesome older woman, just held me and cried.
SPEAKER_02: And more than one neighbor asked, Did you know about the meth lab?
SPEAKER_02: And more than one neighbor accused, how could you not have known about the meth lab?
SPEAKER_02: So the jury was in.
SPEAKER_02: The neighbors hated Hank, and they really weren't sure how they felt about us, knowing that we called Hank our friend.
SPEAKER_02: The press swarmed our neighborhood with relentless fixation.
SPEAKER_02: Ours was the largest drug bust in Durham for the year.
SPEAKER_02: And if you know anything about Durham, North Carolina, that's like a that's like a record.
SPEAKER_02: Because there's a lot of them.
SPEAKER_02: And the press did what it does best, stirred up unrest, left neighbors feeling raw and exposed and frightened.
SPEAKER_02: And by the day's end, when it was safe to open our windows and doors, and when our neighbors finally left, we gathered our children and we prayed for Hank.
SPEAKER_02: And after we tucked the children and dogs in bed, for that first moment, Kent and I could actually look in each other's eyes and talk about what happened.
SPEAKER_02: We we tried to piece this together.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, how could we have missed a meth lab across the street?
SPEAKER_02: Was Hank a quirky, depressed Hank, a dangerous man?
SPEAKER_02: Kent looked at me and said, Would you have done any of this differently?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, befriending Hank.
SPEAKER_02: And I knew what he meant.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, for the past two years, our neighbors had been warning us.
SPEAKER_02: They'd been telling me it was dangerous to take walks with this man and that he was unpredictable and they they didn't like him and his dog was dangerous.
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know, were they right and we wrong?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it sure seemed so.
SPEAKER_02: But I said no.
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_02: Kent Jesus dined with sinners, and so do we.
SPEAKER_02: We must.
SPEAKER_02: Right, Kent said.
SPEAKER_02: But being known as a friend of sinners has an edge to it that I have never experienced before this very moment.
SPEAKER_02: And that edge is very sharp.
SPEAKER_02: And that edge was ours now, whether we liked it or not.
SPEAKER_02: And what is that edge?
SPEAKER_02: Well, it's this.
SPEAKER_02: When Christians throw their lot in with Jesus, we lose the right to protect our reputations.
SPEAKER_02: When you love the stranger, you become strange.
SPEAKER_02: There is simply no way to love the stranger without losing some skin in the game.
SPEAKER_02: Well, we stayed up late, which for me is actually a Herculean effort, but we with a cup of coffee I could manage it.
SPEAKER_02: We stayed up late and we wrote two letters.
SPEAKER_02: One to Hank, reminding him of our friendship, our love, and the promises of God.
SPEAKER_02: And the second was an open invitation to all of our neighbors, that would be all 300 households, inviting them to come to our home for a cookout on that Lord's Day after church.
SPEAKER_02: We posted this net this invitation on the next door app, and it went out to everybody.
SPEAKER_02: Now, this might sound excessive, but we do this a lot.
SPEAKER_02: All right, we do this a lot.
SPEAKER_02: We just invite everybody.
SPEAKER_02: And I want you to know three things happen when you invite everybody.
SPEAKER_02: And the third thing is Kent's favorite thing.
SPEAKER_02: The first two are my favorite things.
SPEAKER_02: Number one, literally everybody feels loved.
SPEAKER_02: All right, you will get letters from women who are shut in and widowed, who need to a trip to the doctor, and you will have never known it.
SPEAKER_02: You will get uh notices from people who need childcare, you will get you will get uh private messages from people saying, I've never been invited to anything since the divorce, you have no idea how this made my day.
SPEAKER_02: That's the first thing that will happen.
SPEAKER_02: The second thing that will happen is you're casting a wide net.
SPEAKER_02: When you do open and regular invitations, you cast a wide net.
SPEAKER_02: And for people, your neighbors who are afflicted with abuse or addiction, they might not be able to tell you when they're going to be sober or safe.
SPEAKER_02: They might not be able to say, yeah, next Tuesday at seven is great.
SPEAKER_02: But an open invitation that's a little bit on the fly, if they're sober or safe, they're gonna show up.
SPEAKER_02: And the third thing that happens, and this is Kent's favorite, and maybe you engineers in the audience will appreciate this, it's called the 10% rule.
SPEAKER_02: When you invite everybody on the fly, about 10% of the people are gonna be able to come.
SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
SPEAKER_02: That's a pretty manageable group when you have a large backyard and it's summer.
SPEAKER_02: And if we actually run out of hot dogs, you know, that might be the best thing that ever happened to us, right?
SPEAKER_02: So we sent it out.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and um we I mean, we were very simple.
SPEAKER_02: This is what Kent wrote.
SPEAKER_02: Dear neighbors, let's meet for a cookout at the Butterfields this Lord's Day at 3 p.m.
SPEAKER_02: We have a lot to talk about.
SPEAKER_02: I'll cook burgers and hot dogs, and we will serve sweet iced tea.
SPEAKER_02: Please bring lawn chairs and bring friends.
SPEAKER_02: Love in Christ, Kent.
SPEAKER_02: Well, we weren't sure what was going to happen that Lord's Day when we came home, but we weren't ready for this.
SPEAKER_02: By the time we came home, the party had already started.
SPEAKER_02: I thought maybe there was a graduation party going on, and my, you know, there were picnic tables and and tents, and there, you know, the the kids were already playing, the neighbor kids had already figured out how to use our hose and put water balloons together.
SPEAKER_02: Um we just pretty much had to show up.
SPEAKER_02: Um, and we didn't do any of this.
SPEAKER_02: And as soon as we walked in the door, neighbors started to appear in all directions.
SPEAKER_02: And it was amazing.
SPEAKER_02: These people were mad at us, remember?
SPEAKER_02: But here we were, familiar faces, open arms.
SPEAKER_02: Bouquets of homegrown irises in a little girl's apron, a warm pan of home-baked beans.
SPEAKER_02: We embraced each other warmly.
SPEAKER_02: After coolers of water and sweet iced tea were poured over ice, Kent brought the first tray of burgers and hot dogs hot off the grill to the red checkered tablecloth, and he gathered us all to the front yard.
SPEAKER_02: The timing was perfect as voices had already started to rise in disagreement over the meaning of Hank's odd behavior and the discovery of the meth lab.
SPEAKER_02: Standing in the middle of the driveway, I watched Kent do what I've seen him do many, many times.
SPEAKER_02: It's a, you don't learn it in seminary, but it's a gift.
SPEAKER_02: It's a combination of a sermonette and a table address.
SPEAKER_02: Kent delivered this combination of a sermon on loving your neighbor and blessing our food.
SPEAKER_02: And we had a hungry captive audience.
SPEAKER_02: So they had to listen.
SPEAKER_02: Hank was our neighbor, Kent said, and Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, all of our neighbors, both the ones that are easy to love and the ones that are not.
SPEAKER_02: Kent described Hank as a mild-mannered recluse who helped us chop down trees.
SPEAKER_02: And Kent shared some of Hank's time in the military and his experience as a homeless person.
SPEAKER_02: And Kent warned us of the destructive power of gossip and failing to love each other.
SPEAKER_02: And he reminded us that drug addiction makes slaves of men.
SPEAKER_02: He told our angry neighbors that we are all capable of the most heinous of sins.
SPEAKER_02: And Kent let it be known to all that the same power that raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the grave is bestowed on all who repent and believe.
SPEAKER_02: Hank's story is not over yet, Kent said, and neither is yours.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus saved sinners just like us.
SPEAKER_02: After we ate and kids ran off for water gun fights, can I just tell you that there is nothing like crime scene tape as a prop for some of the games?
SPEAKER_02: There is nothing like it.
SPEAKER_02: You cannot replicate it.
SPEAKER_02: After that went on for a while, Kent gathered us back to the driveway to talk.
SPEAKER_02: Some of our neighbors had become what only the King James captures properly, Roth.
SPEAKER_02: They had become Roth.
SPEAKER_02: And now directly against Kent and his sympathetic interpretation of Hank.
SPEAKER_02: Others were simply worried about property values.
SPEAKER_02: And as adults talked, I know, right?
SPEAKER_02: As adults talked, you know, the children who weren't enjoying the crime scene tape for a prop were just flopping on the warm grass, petting Tank's belly.
SPEAKER_02: This is an enormous dog.
SPEAKER_02: And as the sun set, I brought mugs with steaming coffee out, and people lingered over these risky conversations, these risky friendships that we were all forging here.
SPEAKER_02: We were not agreeing to disagree.
SPEAKER_02: We were disagreeing and sticking it out.
SPEAKER_02: We were coming together in spite of strife, betrayal, and disagreement about who Hank was and about who we are.
SPEAKER_02: And we stood there drinking coffee and picking at potato salad until it was too dark to see your fork.
SPEAKER_02: Neighbors embraced as they departed, tentatively but genuinely, wiping away runaway tears with the back of a hand.
SPEAKER_02: One neighbor told Kent that she had been a little girl in a Baptist church once long ago, who believed what Kent said about Jesus saving sinners just like us.
SPEAKER_02: That had been thirty years ago, and she wondered, is Jesus still waiting for her?
SPEAKER_02: Another neighbor said that the pastor of his church had talked that morning about the meth lab in Durham, but he hadn't put a personal face on it, either the personal face of Jesus or the personal face of Hank.
SPEAKER_02: And another woman said that at work that week she heard that rotting in prison for life would be the just outcome for that awful man.
SPEAKER_02: And our neighbor told her colleague that Hank's Christian neighbors would stick with Hank, because that's what Christian neighbors do.
SPEAKER_02: It was a procession of hope, a vision of promise, a drop of expectation that Jesus will make something good out of all of this for Hank and for the rest of us.
SPEAKER_02: Well, after the all-neighborhood barbecue, the cleanup of a meth lab began to take place in real time, right before our eyes.
SPEAKER_02: It seemed that as soon as neighbors started to heal, something else happened that just opened raw the wound.
SPEAKER_02: The front door of Hank's house faces our front door, and so we could not miss anything.
SPEAKER_02: Every gory detail was just laid bare before us.
SPEAKER_02: Meth is toxic, and anything in the house, including floorboards and walls, were removed and destroyed.
SPEAKER_02: Dumpsters filled the driveway, hauling away personal treasures from a life lost to us.
SPEAKER_02: As the children in the neighborhood watched, they grieved.
SPEAKER_02: Children are not insensitive in the ways that adults are.
SPEAKER_02: They feel the acute pain of losing a drum set and a dog and your favorite sweatshirt and your baby pictures and all the important stuff on your refrigerator.
SPEAKER_02: We helplessly watched as dumpsters filled and departed, filled and departed.
SPEAKER_02: And with each dumpster, the shame of getting caught was laid bare.
SPEAKER_02: That the wages of sin is death as a palpable horror when you watch your neighbor disappear one dumpster at a time.
SPEAKER_02: It took seven to erase him.
SPEAKER_02: The children kept count.
SPEAKER_02: Summer turned to fall and fall to winter, and still the house remained enveloped in crime scene tape.
SPEAKER_02: The betrayal and grief in our neighborhood remained thick.
SPEAKER_02: And it was during this time that Kent and I started to practice this thing we call daily radical ordinary hospitality.
SPEAKER_02: Gathering our church family, especially the singles in our church and the students, alongside of neighbors, any neighbor that will come.
SPEAKER_02: These were open invitations.
SPEAKER_02: And people started coming.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they brought food.
SPEAKER_02: More often they brought friends.
SPEAKER_02: And nightly we gathered and we grieved and we talked and we opened our Bible and we opened the Psalter and we prayed.
SPEAKER_02: And then one winter day, when we were snowed out of church, something finally happened that broke the cycle of anger in our neighborhood.
SPEAKER_02: A snowstorm in the South is a disarming event.
SPEAKER_02: This one started at 4 a.m.
SPEAKER_02: on a Saturday.
SPEAKER_02: Snow and ice came down fast, and we were all homebound.
SPEAKER_02: By mid-morning, all local churches were canceling Sunday services, so Kent asked me to write something on the next door app, inviting the whole neighborhood to have worship at our house.
SPEAKER_02: By Saturday noon, the roads were what we call Southern Bad.
SPEAKER_02: Southern Bad means no cars driving on the roads, it's just kids with their boogie boards or their mama's laundry baskets going down hills.
SPEAKER_02: And after a few hours of sledding down the streets in laundry baskets, they all returned to our house.
SPEAKER_02: And I had a pile of children with snot freezing to their noses, literally melting in my homeschool room.
SPEAKER_02: Hospitality's not a pretty sight.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
SPEAKER_02: I had a pyramid of wet white athletic socks at the front door.
SPEAKER_02: All of my towels were used for the purpose of drying, and whatever was left of the Arnica gel, all I had was an empty squeezed-out tube.
SPEAKER_02: Kent kept an eye on the roads, sent the big kids out to shovel the driveways of old people, and started revising a sermon that he wanted our neighbors to hear.
SPEAKER_02: Kent had been praying about what to preach, about what would bring healing and saving grace and a knowledge of Jesus Christ as prophet, priest, and king.
SPEAKER_02: I marveled at the opportunity that God had given us in this neighborhood to proclaim Christ because of this crisis and to continue to have neighbors seek us out daily to ask, where is God in all of this mess?
SPEAKER_02: And even as we disappointed each other in our conflicting responses to Hank's crime, they continued to come, come to our dinner table, come for food and fellowship and Bible reading and prayer.
SPEAKER_02: And our family continued to pray for and write to Hank, and Kent was also able to visit Hank, although visitations in a county jail are loud and public and generally not conducive to genuine conversation.
SPEAKER_02: Hank always wrote back, always grateful to hear that Hank was safe and loved, and that the kids didn't despise him for what he had done.
SPEAKER_02: His helplessness to care for his aged mother or his beloved dog made his anxiety never ending.
SPEAKER_02: Hank's life of incarceration has been filled with constant worry and unyielding fear.
SPEAKER_02: The steady fall of snow and the steady stream of children coming in for hot chocolate, then returning to the snow to shovel neighbors' driveways or pummel each other silly was comforting.
SPEAKER_02: I kept my eye on the worsening weather and the great prospect of Lord's Day worship with neighbors.
SPEAKER_02: Many who do not know the Lord, many who would never walk through the door of our church, but they'd been walking through the door of our house now to complain to me for at least six months.
SPEAKER_02: Surely a barrier had been broken.
SPEAKER_02: I started a cook for a crowd, and Kent started working on his sermon, and we started enlisting the kids, all of the kids, to clean up our house and get ready.
SPEAKER_02: My my rule these days, if if I see you larking around in my house, whether you're mine or not, I give you a chore.
SPEAKER_02: The gospel comes with a housekeeping, but it comes with a chore chart too.
SPEAKER_02: You might not know that.
SPEAKER_02: And I keep waiting for one of these kids to say, hey, you're not my mom, and they haven't done it yet.
SPEAKER_02: I had a neighbor boy peel 15 pounds of potatoes the day before Easter.
SPEAKER_02: No kidding.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is so I'm really kind of enjoying this.
SPEAKER_02: But on that Lord's Day morning, I woke up and I felt nothing but panic.
SPEAKER_02: We had invited all of our neighbors over on a day when we really could have just had a quiet time of family devotions.
SPEAKER_02: What if everyone actually comes?
SPEAKER_02: This is not exactly outdoor barbecue weather.
SPEAKER_02: But the scarier thought, what if nobody comes?
SPEAKER_02: So I did the only thing you can do in that moment.
SPEAKER_02: I poured my coffee and I started my devotions, letting the word of God comfort my agitated heart.
SPEAKER_02: And after private devotions, I gathered the pots of soup from the screened in porch, put them on a low burner, and I gathered other things and started the rice and warmed up the bread, and the children readied the house for worship.
SPEAKER_02: We've been through this before, but no matter how many times we do this, it's always exciting.
SPEAKER_02: So after breakfast, we put away the almost finished monopoly game.
SPEAKER_02: We got the, you know, the coffee table set up as a makeshift pulpit, and almost as soon as Kent prayed for our days, our beloved neighbors started to walk through our open door.
SPEAKER_02: Missy, the two millers, Ryan and his son Ben, the three muters, the five shepherds, the Harviews, the Five Mackenzies.
SPEAKER_02: Susanna and Mark and Eddie had already been here because one of them had stayed overnight.
SPEAKER_02: Twenty-eight neighbors in all, and a gaggle of extra children.
SPEAKER_02: I just stopped counting.
SPEAKER_02: Some bring pots of soup and loaves of bread and good coffee beans.
SPEAKER_02: I'm serving tea and coffee and hot cocoa, and the kids are embracing their friends.
SPEAKER_02: My daughter is squealing with delight while my son finds places for coats and boots.
SPEAKER_02: Bella, our small and elegant shihtzu, will soon be burying herself in these coats.
SPEAKER_02: We gather our mugs and our smiles and press cold cheek to cold cheek.
SPEAKER_02: Donna, my neighborhood prayer partner, locks arms with me and she says, This is bigger than my dreams.
SPEAKER_02: One set of neighbors looks across the room to see an older lady for whom they had been praying for two decades.
SPEAKER_02: They have longed to see her in church and in Christ, but the barriers have always seemed surmountable.
SPEAKER_02: But all the barriers of walking through into our house had been already torn down.
SPEAKER_02: They were torn down by countless meals, by countless conversations, by countless disagreements.
SPEAKER_02: We knew how to walk into each other's lives.
SPEAKER_02: It reminded me of Psalm 147, the Lord who numbers and names the stars, who heals the brokenhearted and binds up our wounds.
SPEAKER_02: Well, he also determines the number of stars.
SPEAKER_02: He gives them all their names.
SPEAKER_02: And here she is, her name among the stars.
SPEAKER_02: And here they are as well, these neighbors who have been praying for her to behold the fruit of 20 years of prayer.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Kent welcomes everyone and reminds us of the powerful role that Jesus bestows upon neighbors.
SPEAKER_02: People sit on the couch, the floor, the piano bench, and the chairs that the kids are bringing in from the dining room.
SPEAKER_02: The children distribute every Bible and Psalter in the house.
SPEAKER_02: We don't have enough to go around.
SPEAKER_02: So people have to sit close to each other, close enough to share.
SPEAKER_02: The yellow crime scene tape is glaring from the front window, and Kent goes right there.
SPEAKER_02: He tells us that he's preaching on forgiveness, on Christ's forgiveness of those who repent and believe, and of our responsive forgiveness for one another.
SPEAKER_02: Kent says, Jesus calls us to forgive, because without forgiveness, we cannot be agents of grace or be in the path of grace.
SPEAKER_02: No more small talk.
SPEAKER_02: Kent assembles our worship service with prayer, and then he asks us to open our Psalters to Psalm 23.
SPEAKER_02: Kent explains that in worship we sing a cappella without instruments.
SPEAKER_02: Now, some neighbors have been through this, but others are right now registering a level of fear and panic that no meth lab could ever produce.
SPEAKER_02: It was all about singing a cappella.
SPEAKER_02: Well, the melody for the psalm that we were singing is called crimmed.
SPEAKER_02: And for some, this Welsh rendition is familiar and elegant.
SPEAKER_02: We sing slowly, we savor how mere words weave reassurance.
SPEAKER_02: You might know this song.
SPEAKER_02: I think, and if you do, you can sing it with me.
SPEAKER_01: I'll not want.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, walk in death's dark veil, yet we fear no will, for thou art with me and thy rod and staff me calm for still.
SPEAKER_02: My mind wanders to the documentary of Temple Grandin, a professor a professor of animal science and an autism rights leader.
SPEAKER_02: She studies cows, and she developed a system to move cows through a chute in order to make a slaughterhouse more humane.
SPEAKER_02: So paradoxical, so distasteful.
SPEAKER_02: And why is the pastor's wife, who's leading the music, thinking about this anyway, you might be wondering, right in the middle of a psalm.
SPEAKER_02: It was so symbolic to what secularism does to a culture.
SPEAKER_02: It makes the slaughterhouse seem inevitable and innocuous.
SPEAKER_02: But cows are different from sheep.
SPEAKER_02: Cows must be prodded from behind.
SPEAKER_02: Sheep must be gently led from the front and comforted from the side.
SPEAKER_02: That's the only way that we can walk through life and death.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus, our shepherd, leads gently.
SPEAKER_01: A table who thou hast furnished me in presence.
SPEAKER_01: With oil anoint, and my cup overflows.
SPEAKER_02: He says in Luke 10, 3, Behold, I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.
SPEAKER_02: And I ponder this.
SPEAKER_02: We are singing much more slowly than we do in church.
SPEAKER_02: And many are singing this for the first time.
SPEAKER_02: There's no posturing.
SPEAKER_02: We're looking at each other, we're locking eyes, we're in a circle, and the words of Christ are sinking down, down, down.
SPEAKER_02: And then we conclude.
SPEAKER_02: This is intimate business.
SPEAKER_02: When we sing a psalm together, we speak the truth of God's word one to another, truth unhinged from our problems and our peeves.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe for the first time in our lives, people can be neighbors for decades and never do this.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Kent prays for our worship and asks God to be present with us, to work healing where healing is needed, repentance where repentance is needed, and salvation where salvation is needed.
SPEAKER_02: Kent does not mince words.
SPEAKER_02: Kent's sermon is from Matthew 5:7.
SPEAKER_02: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
SPEAKER_02: The Beatitudes are so rich, delivered to the disciples.
SPEAKER_02: They require faith to execute.
SPEAKER_02: Kent starts to preach.
SPEAKER_02: Kent tells our neighbors you can show mercy only if you know God's peace.
SPEAKER_02: If you're still mad at Hank, then you have spiritual work to do.
SPEAKER_02: Do you have God's peace?
SPEAKER_02: And Kent concludes with this question: Have you made peace with Jesus?
SPEAKER_02: Do you know him?
SPEAKER_02: Have you repented of your sin and placed your hope in Christ alone?
SPEAKER_02: Today is the day of salvation.
SPEAKER_02: And then Kent prays.
SPEAKER_02: He prays for salvation where it's needed.
SPEAKER_02: He prays that God will help our unbelief.
SPEAKER_02: And nothing about this worship service is business as usual.
SPEAKER_02: Everything is risky and open and transparent and raw.
SPEAKER_02: And after the benediction, Kent invites everyone to step into the dining room and the kitchen and the foyer and the homeschool room, all of the rooms where tables have been set with place settings.
SPEAKER_02: We bring the dining room chairs back into the dining room, and we bring the piano bench too and the exercise ball.
SPEAKER_02: Snug aromas and sing song tones of neighbor talk promise good tidings.
SPEAKER_02: That morning I had set places for 25 people, gathering.
SPEAKER_02: Around as many flat surfaces as I could find.
SPEAKER_02: I grossly underestimated, but that's okay.
SPEAKER_02: Some of us are happy to sit on the floor.
SPEAKER_02: We make an assembly line, passing pots of soup through a narrow hallway.
SPEAKER_02: We ooh and ah over the warm bread that Maisie pulls out of the oven, the amazing white chicken chili that Tina brought.
SPEAKER_02: The children pile their plates high in bowls deep, and then they head out to the freezing cold screened-in porch to eat without the grown-ups.
SPEAKER_02: We talk about kids and snow and work, cancer and bad knees and politics.
SPEAKER_02: In the South, that pretty much covers it.
SPEAKER_02: And then the talk moves to Hank.
SPEAKER_02: Kent, tell us how Hank's doing.
SPEAKER_02: I hear that you visit him in jail, David offers as the warm bread makes another go through the tables.
SPEAKER_02: Kent takes a breath.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Hank is fragile, of course.
SPEAKER_02: Jail breaks a man.
SPEAKER_02: But Hank has recently committed his life to Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: This is truth unmasked.
SPEAKER_02: Hank's recent and very fragile faith in Jesus is not cheap news.
SPEAKER_02: This is the kind of news that moves mountains.
SPEAKER_02: Quiet descends, but a holy hush hovers over the table.
SPEAKER_02: And Kent explains that Hank has been desperate for help, but no earthly help can go where he is.
SPEAKER_02: There's no pretending otherwise.
SPEAKER_02: This was Hank's second offense.
SPEAKER_02: At that point, it looked like he was going to be in for life.
SPEAKER_02: Hank needs Jesus the rescuer, Kent said, because no one else can go.
SPEAKER_02: He's detoxed from meth and he is feeling completely and utterly lost.
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't need a peptock.
SPEAKER_02: He needs Jesus the Savior to shepherd him through the long, dark days ahead.
SPEAKER_02: Hank was never raised in the church.
SPEAKER_02: He had never opened a Bible in his life.
SPEAKER_02: And so all of this is very new.
SPEAKER_02: But he's reading his Bible daily and he's praying for all of you, and he's thankful for those of you who are praying for him.
SPEAKER_02: Kent is speaking softly now in the room, once bursting with talk and laughter, is captive in silence.
SPEAKER_02: And then Kent says, you know, Hank is no longer the meth addict across the street.
SPEAKER_02: He's my brother in Christ.
SPEAKER_02: It's hard to explain what happens to a community when the man the easiest to hate becomes a Christian brother and commits his life to Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: It's hard to explain what happens, but I suspect you can imagine that changes everything.
SPEAKER_02: And it changes everything because the gospel changes everything.
SPEAKER_02: The gospel does not only change the fate and the future of an individual, but the gospel changes everything.
SPEAKER_02: God puts the lonely in families.
SPEAKER_02: And how does he do this?
SPEAKER_02: Well, he works through you your house, your life, your weakness, the unfolded laundry on your dining room table, the cat hair that you can never get out of your couch.
SPEAKER_02: That's what he works with.
SPEAKER_02: And we see this principle powerfully displayed for us in the Gospel of Mark.
SPEAKER_02: And if you have your Bibles, please turn with me to Mark chapter 10.
SPEAKER_02: And if you're an underliner and it's your Bible, don't do it to the pew Bible, I'm going to ask you to underline something.
SPEAKER_02: This is Mark chapter 10, starting with verse 28.
SPEAKER_02: All of you with that holy glow of your cell phone and your iPads got there quicker, but Peter began to say to Jesus, see, we have left everything and followed you.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus said, Truly, I say to you that there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time.
SPEAKER_02: If you have a pen, underline that.
SPEAKER_02: Who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time?
SPEAKER_02: Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands with persecutions and in the age to come, eternal life.
SPEAKER_02: You see, the gospel meets us all as strangers and enemies to God.
SPEAKER_02: And the gospel delivers belonging in the family of God.
SPEAKER_02: And it promises a hundredfold of these vital and intimate relationships, even if you're in prison for life, even if you are in solitary confinement, even if you are on death row, even if you are in a Turkish prison for preaching the gospel.
SPEAKER_02: It promises a hundredfold now in this time.
SPEAKER_02: And that hundredfold is very practical.
SPEAKER_02: This is not Ephesians.
SPEAKER_02: I love Ephesians.
SPEAKER_02: I love every spiritual blessing.
SPEAKER_02: I want all of that.
SPEAKER_02: This is foot-on-the-floor stuff.
SPEAKER_02: It addresses things like where will I live?
SPEAKER_02: With whom will I eat dinner and pray?
SPEAKER_02: How will I face the burden of my sin and my weakness?
SPEAKER_02: How will I get through this grief?
SPEAKER_02: How will I get through this holiday?
SPEAKER_02: The hundredfold promise in this verse is simply not going to fall from the sky.
SPEAKER_02: You cannot pray that the Holy Spirit will provide this hundredfold promise to your neighbor Bob, because it's not his job.
SPEAKER_02: This hundredfold promise is going to come from me, and it's going to come from you, and collectively it's going to come from the church acting like the family of God.
SPEAKER_02: Or it's not going to come at all.
SPEAKER_02: You see, gospel life is covenantal and communal.
SPEAKER_02: And when the gospel comes with a house key, we actually put a nail in the coffin of our culture's obsession with individualism, which is the bedrock of secularism.
SPEAKER_02: If you believe that these are dangerous times, desperate, barbaric times, then you are absolutely right.
SPEAKER_02: The princes of this world with Satan behind them are demolishing what it means to be male, to be female, to be human, to be an image-bearer of a holy God with a soul that will last forever, and a gendered body that will either inherit to the new Jerusalem in glory or suffer for eternity in hell.
SPEAKER_02: The highest achievement of atheistic modernity is this: the autonomous, freely choosing man or woman finding meaning in nothing but himself.
SPEAKER_02: Major sectors of the church have gone apostate, and many more are teetering on the brink.
SPEAKER_02: And the threads of Christian tradition sewn into the fabric of culture is good for everyone as it tends toward creation-mandated life.
SPEAKER_02: And likewise, its steady erasure will mean, and maybe sooner than you think, that Christians could find ourselves inhabiting a similar position as that of the church in early Rome.
SPEAKER_02: And in these desperate times, Jesus is leading you and me from the front of the line.
SPEAKER_02: I believe that hospitality is the front line of evangelism in this post-Christian world.
SPEAKER_02: Your home is not your castle, it's God's embassy.
SPEAKER_02: Your white carpet is not your God.
SPEAKER_02: Your time is not your own.
SPEAKER_02: Your home is an incubator and a hospital for strangers to become neighbors and neighbors to become part of the family of God.
SPEAKER_02: Hospitality, I believe, is the new face of spiritual warfare.
SPEAKER_02: Our entire theological system is on display in everything that we do.
SPEAKER_02: I believe that the gospel comes with a housekeeping, and if it doesn't, I don't believe you're preaching the gospel.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.