By not walking - we miss our world

Last week I took the bus home from work and walked the 5 blocks from the corner of Brainerd and Germantown to our house. I walked past a stretch of land that is empty because the slope makes it unfeasible for construction, I was immediately aware of the trash in the brush – bottles, cans, bags, glass, plastic, paper – just lots of trash. It struck me that if I had been driving up that street I would not have noticed the empty lot, say nothing of the trash. Living life at accelerated pace allows us to ignore the reality of a fallen world. We can go from protected familiarity to protected familiarity – from home to work, from health club to church, from shopping mall to friendly house – without ever really seeing the world that’s in between, without having to confront what is ugly, broken and lost. Even when I ride my bike I don’t see things as carefully as you do on foot. There is an aspect of separation, of distance from what’s going on around me when I ride. There is a factor of concentration – of necessary focus required in the skill – that does not permit one to really focus on the reality around. It is only when walking that you can both mindlessly move while focusing on what is really around you. I have a suspicion that our evangelical world does not recognize how fallen the world really is because we have isolated ourselves in the middle class bubble of automotive life. Our heart does not break because we do not ever see the harder edges of our reality except through the flickering and distant images of the television. We pat ourselves on the back thinking things are really pretty much ok, and other than those pesky pockets of malfeasance in the ghettos or the middle east – this world is pretty much redeemed. We need to start walking through our world.