seattle :)

I love living in Seattle. I don’t know if it’s the persistent drizzle and frequent rainstorms, that sound of tires on wet concrete, the fresh air, the coffee. I just don’t know.

I’ve lived on the east side my whole life, and moving to Seattle has been like a breath of fresh air. I don’t yet know if I’m to attribute this to my youth, and my desire to be around such energy, or if when I’m old and gray I’ll want to be in the heart of such activity. Time will tell.

The ave is like nowhere on earth. Drug dealers, students, professors, homeless, dogs, red cross people with their annoying clip-boards, foreigners chatting away in their language, groups of people standing around smoking, everyone seems to have a cup of coffee. Bustling with diversity. But not that crappy kind of diversity people talk about in the academic sense “look, we’re all different, and we can get along!” None of that. The fact that everyone around you seems to be completely different. Nobody is the same, and it’s so clear. I’m not excited because I’m excited for diversity and some kind of new age “common ground”. But I am head-over-heals FASCINATED that God creates so many different people, and that each one has a unique story that upon first glance seems so different from your own. 

And yet, it’s a city that breaks my heart. There is so much creativity here, so much life and exuberance, and yet it is so empty and lonely. Nobody talks on the buses, nobody seems to be friendly on the ave, eye contact is avoided. (How different would the world be if for the rest of your life you looked everyone you passed in the eye with a smile on your face?)

But I can hear the knocks on the door, the mighty yet feeble door of Seattle. I can hear thunderous knocks…

BOOM

BOOM

BOOM

Jesus is at the door, and he wants in. The door is opening a crack, I can’t wait for it to be swung open with full force to glorious light. This city will never recover from the unceasing, unmerited, overflowing love of Christ. It will be transformed.

It is a thousand pities that the word “child” has so few words that rhyme with it appropriate for a hymn. But for this paucity of launguage we might have been spared the couplet that hundreds of thousands must have learned in their childhood:

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child.

But perhaps it was not the stingencies of verse-making that led the writer to apply the word “mild” to Jesus Christ, for here it is in another children’s hymn and this time at the beginning of the line:

Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as He.

Why “mild”? Of all the epithets that could be applied to Christ this seems one of the least apropriate. For what does “mild”, as applied to a person, conjure up to our minds? Surely a picture of someone who wouldn’t say “boo” to the proverbial goose; someone who would let sleeping dogs lie and avoid trouble wherever possible; someone of a placid temperament who is almost a stranger to the passions of red-blooded humanity; someone who is a bit of a nonentity, both uninspired and uninspiring.

This word “mild” is apparently deliberately used to describe a man who did not hesitate to challenge and expose the hypocrisies of the religious people of His day: a man who had such “personality” that He walked unscathed through a murderous crowd; a man so far from being a nonentity that He was regarded by the authorities as a public danger; a man who could be moved to violent anger by shameless explitation or by smug compacent orthodxy; a man of such courage that He deliberately walked to what He knew would mean death, despite the earnest pleas of well-meaning friends! Mild! What a word to use for a personality whose challenge and strange attractiveness ninteen centuries have by no means exhausted. Jesus Christ might well be called “meek,” in the sense of being selfless and humble and utterly devoted to what He considered right, whatever the personal cost; but “mild,” never!

Yet it is this fatal combination fo “meek and mild” which has been so often, and is even now, applied to Him. We can hardly be surprised if children feel fairly soon that they have outgrown the “tender Shepherd” and find their heroes elsewhere.

J.B. Phillips in Your God is Too Small