So this week our Pre-School took its annual trip to the pumpkin patch at Cox’s Farm, which is one of the highlights of the year for me. We had our hay ride, all the apples you could eat (5 for me: two Golden Delicious, one Gala, one Red Delicious, and one Rome Beauty), saw a cow milked, watched the Farmer Jack Show (my favorite farmer Jack joke: “Knock, knock,” Who’s there?” “Cowgoes,” “Cowgoes Who?” “NO, a cow goes MOOO!”), saw baby pigs, ate boardwalk fries, and picked a pumpkin to take home - all on a glorious October day. But something happened in line for boardwalk fries that has disturbed me since. I saw a blotchy earlobe.
I wasn’t in line for boardwalk fries exactly, I was in the condiment line to get some malted vinegar for my fries (don’t tell my wife that, I’m not supposed to have malted vinegar – I guess five apples isn’t a good idea either), and the lady in front of me had a blotchy earlobe. I noticed this because she had her hair pulled back in a pony-tail, and I was behind her for a long time. Also I’ve been paying closer attention to ears lately, since I’ve had to keep track of my own. This all started, one day when I had a stray hair itching my neck, and I kept combing and combing to get it back in place – unsuccessfully. So I decided to yank it out, and found it was growing out of my ear. Then that same week I was at the Hair Cuttery and the lady said, “I’m almost finished, I just have to do your ears,” to which I replied, “You’ve trimmed around my ears fine”, and she said, “No, I mean the hair ON your ears.” Hirsute ears have always made me shudder, and so I pay meticulous attention mine now, and find myself checking on the auricular fastidiousness of others (which, I realize as I type this, sounds really creepy).
So this lady in front of me had a big black blotch on the inside of her left earlobe – clearly visible from behind, but which would be completely hidden from her when she looked in the mirror. It wasn’t a mole, or a freckle. It looked like a melanoma spot – a big, ugly melanoma spot. I thought I should tell her about this. She had three kids with her – two beautiful little girls in a two-seat stroller, and a cute little boy a bit older. It would be awful for them to loose their mother to cancer. She also had her husband with her. “Surely he has seen this and told her about it,” I thought. Then I remembered that her husband, being a man, could really only be held responsible for noticing that she had the correct number of ears, and that they were attached in generally the right place. Should I say something, or not? A mom’s life might depend upon it.
I decided to say nothing. If I were one of Washington D.C.’s leading dermatologists, like Doctor Brady, or a nurse, an EMT, or even a little less old and creepy I might have said something – but I am none of these things, and as I said, her husband was there – and he looked like Ray Lewis (only bigger). So they went away, she pushing the stroller, he carrying the trays, and I worrying about it ever since.
And yet – I didn’t, for one second, worry about their souls.
You may think that transition facile and preacherly, but I am serious. They were a nice family out on a sunny, October day. Were they my brother and sister in Christ? I don’t know, and what bothers me is not my ignorance so much as my acceptance of it - my lack of inquisitiveness. I didn’t even wonder about it. I had not one gram of the urgency Jesus expressed for the souls of the multitudes in Matthew 9.36-38. Why is that? It isn’t because of callousness – a callous person wouldn’t spend time worrying about a stranger’s splotchy earlobe. It is obliviousness – spiritual obliviousness, and I wish I knew its source.
There was a video, and then a commercial out last year, which both featured ticking, digital clocks above the heads of all the persons shown, as those persons went about their day. The clocks were running down in increments of hundredths of a second – hurtling towards zero. The clocks represented the time each person had left to live. Some had years, some weeks, some hours, some only seconds left. The thing was that each person was oblivious to his own clock and to the clocks of others. Sobering.
And true.
I cannot, yet, identify the source of my own spiritual obliviousness. But I do know the source of its opposite – awareness of and urgency for souls – it is the love of Jesus.
"For the love of Christ controls us – knowing that one died for all, therefore we all died; and he died so that they who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him, who died and rose again on their behalf. Therefore, from now on, we recognize no one according to the flesh….if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature – old things have passed away, behold! All things become new….therefore we are ambassadors of Christ, as though God were entreating the world through us, and so we beg you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God." II Corinthians 5.14-20
