Love Is Not A Commodity

I'm reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller for the third time. I bought it a couple of months ago, perhaps three and I just can't stop reading it over and over. This book, along with several others I have read lately have become almost something like investigative journalism to me. These books investigate my own soul and show me what I've been feeling and thinking about for the last several years, especially when it comes to the church and my role in it.

Anyway, I've been struggling lately again over the whole situation with my former church. Struggling may be too soft of a word. The bitterness burns deep.

I guess the thing that bothers me the most about this situation is that ever since I left this church, I haven't received one phone call. Not one. I have made some phone calls, and I appreciate (I guess) the kind words that people have said to me in those conversations, but yet not one person has called to see how I am doing or how my family is. It's like once we left the church staff, we ceased to exist as living, breathing human beings.

It's been quite some time now.

Anyway, reading is always a cathartic exercise for me, and so I was relieved recently to read towards the end of Blue Like Jazz a section about one of the differences that Miller finds between Christian and non-Christian groups. He uses his own life experiences to compare these two groups; growing up as a Christian he obviously has a large case study of what they do; and he compares those experiences with the experience he had for a month, living in the woods with some non-Christian hippies. His conclusion is that he felt more accepted, more loved by the hippies than by any Christian group that he has encountered or experienced.

An excerpt:

And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money...I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled rotten all these years.

Love is not supposed to be a commodity. I have felt the opposite for awhile now. I feel that when I was on staff at church, when I was leading worship or putting together a video announcement or developing a graphic for the bulletin or participating in a staff meeting or leading a small group - only then did I really have value in the eyes of the Christians at church. Once those responsibilities were gone, once I no longer had any of those things to offer, I no longer had any value in their eyes - and to prove it, no one has even decided to do something as small as check up on me, to make sure that I'm even still alive.

My wife works at a "secular" place of employment, and everyone there knows of our situation. We have received calls and e-mails and notes of encouragement from non-Christians hoping for the best and checking in to make sure everything's okay or to see what the latest development is in my quest for a new ministry. Everyone at her work has been very supportive. I do know that when I do become involved in a church again, I will go out of my way to make sure that I do not allow love to become a commodity in the way I treat others - whether they be staff members, church members, seekers, or someone else.