I flipped through the files of my mind for this week’s article. I needed the voice of my faith. I needed an answer. This voice comes, not from my mind, but from a different place — God’s place. It’s where God talks to my heart. He knows the subject, the timing and who needs understanding or a touch of encouragement.
The files in my mind yielded nothing. I let the moment breathe. I stopped long enough to listen, taking time to honor what was around me. A new concept came — to give that moment a depth of gratitude, no matter the depth of pain, or knowing or living — just breathing in what I was experiencing without any preconceived ideas.
I stepped out of my own picture and into the moment. Wow. That’s big. I’ve always lived my own story, my own movie and my own idea.
“It’s always been about you,” my children would say. Maybe they were right.
Lately, I’ve begun to see life as an outsider, but not quite there yet. It’s a process — no longer the center grunt, with all my ideas and how to get the job done, but how I’m learning to observe life outside of myself. I thought if someone didn’t shore up with how I saw things, they had a problem. I didn’t have the problem.
Sometimes we live life and it still escapes us what life is all about. It seems like that is happening to me more often. The moment is more than just breathing in air. That’s what I experienced when I saw the movie “The Outsider” for the hundredth time.
This fictional movie, written by Penelope Williamson, is playing on YouTube. Over time, the story has drawn me in and I’ve watched it over and over again. It was more than a sweet love story. It had a different message for me, which escaped me until this time when I watched it.
Rebecca Yoder (Naomi Watts) a daughter of the “Plain” people, a widow who has faith in the good of people, takes in a wounded gunfighter, Johnny Gault (Timothy Daly), who in turn helps her in her battle with the men who murdered her husband and tries to take her land.
Gault, the outsider, doesn’t fit in with her closed-minded Quaker community and their herd instinct. It is ironic that the Plain people are actually the outsiders, too, but are intolerant of anyone who is not like them. Yoder is refused and shunned from her community because she chose to fall in love with the stranger.
Williamson placed the story in a religious setting. The Plain people trusted God, did not believe in guns or defending themselves, but believed that only God would defend them. He did. He answered their prayers by sending an outsider, a wounded gunfighter who came from out of nowhere, and who they rejected and refused. He was their answer, but all they could see was that he was not one of them.
The doctor, who sees the old whip marks across the gunfighter’s back and the chain marks on his ankles, sews up his wounds and asks, “What kind of marks were left on his soul?”
That statement went deep in my own heart. What have others gone through that marks left on their souls? Jelly Roll comes to mind. His marks are visible. I love his music and his cry brings me to my knees and before the throne of God. Will we ever get out of our own way and accept someone who is different from us because we see them as an outsider?
Aren’t we all outsiders when it comes to a spiritual encounter with the Lord? His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not ours. Not sure if Williamson was aware of a spiritual likeness in her story or if she wrote it unintentionally. I saw a direct correlation of what Jesus experienced when he came to His people. He came as an outsider to save us and we didn’t know we needed to be saved.
An amazing teaching came to me through this story. Christ is the answer. He came from a different place. He was refused because He wasn’t what they expected. They had prejudice in their hearts as to how they saw God and how they wanted God to be.
Final brushstroke: God is an outsider. Oh me, He doesn’t do everything the way we expect Him to do it. Until are hearts are ready to hear, and we see our own neediness, He is faithful to send the messenger and message over and over until we get it.
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