Agape House UIC

As we spend time this week being thankful for what blessings we have received from God, I will ask you to spend some more time thinking about your neighbors.

"Met a man on the roadside crying,
Without a friend there's no denying,
You're incomplete they'll be no finding,
Looking for what you knew."

Lyrics to the Led Zeppelin song, Friends, may give us a new way to look at the story of the Good Samaritan. Usually, when communities tell this parable of Jesus, they ask us to consider the our association with the characters passing by on the road. Now we raise up the Samaritan as the model for how we should act (which is interesting in itself since the social group in our time that corresponds to Samaritans would be an undocumented migrant-lesbian-Muslim).

What if instead we considered ourselves as the guy on the side of the road, beat up and left for dead? How would our outlook on life differ if we ruminate on all those folks, strangers and friends, who gave us that helping hand when we were lost? For me, this means that were I left alone, I would still be lost on the side of the road. However, people have reached out to me throughout my life, picking me up off the ground. I did not receive these current blessing merely based on my own effort. I owe these blessings to friends I met along the path.

Now I meet others on the path left for dead. And I reach out my hand because I know that in the past that was, and in the future that likely will be ME broken on the side of the road. Just as we will need a friend at that time, they need it now. In gratitude to grace received from God and others around me, we serve others in need.

"So anytime somebody needs you,
Don't let them down although it grieves you,
Someday you'll need someone like they do,
Looking for what you knew."
-Led Zeppelin-