Being a friendly christian from Pete's Page for 1 March 09

She stood there at the bus-stop, day after day, silent tears decorating her ashen cheeks; meanwhile he stood watching, day after day, not aware of the frown on his face, caught somewhere between concern and embarrassment. Has was concerned, but somewhere inside a voice (probably his mum’s) said, “You just don’t go up to strangers and ask what’s wrong?” And yet he was a follower of the One who was continually taking out time for strangers, especially those most people preferred to avoid. Finally he took a deep breath, crossed the yawning chasm of 2 metres, and asked if she was okay. Had to repeat himself twice – language difficulties. She was new in the country, and she’d just heard that her sister was desperately ill and her life hung in the balance. She felt alienated from home, and with her formal English had trouble understanding Kiwis and their weird pronunciations and their unique use of expressions she’d never heard before, she felt alienated in this land in which she’d come to study.
So he arranged to collect her for a meal and friendship with his family, and introduced her to a group of students at his own church she could meet up with during the week. He also arranged for her to make phone calls home from his house (at his cost.)
What provoked this outburst of empathetic caring? He’d remembered his minister talking about Jesus saying, “as much as
you did this for the least of these, you did it for me.” The minister had asserted that you don’t have to go looking for the least; in this very secular world, they were going to cross your path every day and it was up to us to recognise who those least people were. And that we might have to cross barriers of embarrassment and prejudice to be the difference in that person’s life. But when we think of what Jesus has done for us in making us into His Friends, was it really that hard? And he found that it wasn’t once he’d made the leap across the divide of diffidence.
Pete.