There are people we step over every day. Not always with our feet, but with our attention.
They stand in welfare lines, at food banks, in the lobbies of social service offices. They live in motel rooms, in cars, or in the broken houses we drive past with our windows rolled up. We say things like “bad choices” or “poor decisions” to make ourselves feel better about walking around them. And maybe it’s true. Perhaps they did make bad choices, but does that really matter now? Will judgment fix anything?
We say they should “get help.” But what we usually mean is “get help somewhere else.”
The first century had the same crowd. Blind Bartimaeus, shouting by the roadside. The bleeding woman forcing her way through the crowd. Lepers calling out from a distance. You know, the kind of people whose pain makes decent society nervous.
And yet those were the people Jesus stopped for. The outcasts were His interruptions.
If you read the Gospels carefully, you’ll notice something strange. Most of Jesus’ miracles didn’t occur in a church setting. They happened on sidewalks, in alleyways, and in the margins where respectable people refused to look. The Church should be in those places again. We’ve spent too much time guarding our pews and too little time sitting on curbs.
If we really want to follow Him, we’ll have to get comfortable being interrupted by need. We’ll have to stop stepping over the outcasts and start kneeling beside them. When we kneel down, we find that the outcast we stooped to help was never beneath us at all. They were just waiting where Jesus still stands.
