your mess is NOT your own

[made for TV remix]

I was having lunch with my family at a deli recently and my wife and I ordered two taco salads. After ordering, the norm is that I’m in charge of the food pick-up and delivery to the table. For whatever reason, at this deli, they don’t bring the salads to the table; you have to pick them up. That’s not usually a problem…usually.

While carrying the tray with 2 taco salads, I was thinking to myself “I really don’t want to drop these salads; please don’t let me drop these salads”. I’m not sure WHY I was thinking about this, but I was. Once I got to the table, I carefully took one of the salads off of the tray, set it on the table in front of my wife and totally forgot that this would offset the balance of the tray on the table…viola – my taco salad goes crashing to the floor. Salsa, cheese, sour cream, chips and lettuce had taken flight and made a crash landing.

At first, I had no reaction. I think I was in shock; not because this happened, but more so because I had been thinking that I didn’t want this to happen, and it did. I was just standing there…motionless.

When I finally came out of shock, I looked down at the floor and saw the mess. I saw that half of me (my entire left leg) was covered with cheese, salsa and sour cream. I looked at my wife. Then I looked around to see everyone in that area of the restaurant looking at my family and me.

After a couple of seconds, my wife asked, “Al, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just glad that this mess didn’t get onto anyone else.”

She paused. Looked at me with a bit of confusion and said, “uh…maybe you should take another look.” With a bit of embarrassment, she pointed at the person behind me. Hesitating, I looked behind me to see the other half of what didn’t make it onto my left leg, made it onto this guy’s jacket. Before I could get an apologetic word, my wife points to a well-dressed businessman at the table next to us. His white, tailored, cuff link, initial embroidered, dress shirt, was now speckled with salsa polk-a-dots. That’s not the worst part. The worst part was that he didn’t know that he had received ‘extra salsa’ with his turkey sandwich (if you get what I’m saying).

“I’m really sorry about your shirt, sir.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem, I’ve got kids. I know all about this kind of stuff.” He replied.

I smiled at my wife because I was thinking “yeah, except it wasn’t a kid that sprayed you with Pace Picante …it was an adult (sort of).”

The manager of the deli came over with the clean-up crew. They started working on the mess like a NASCAR pit crew. The manager gave me a wet hand towel to clean off my clothes and politely said, “Sir, we’ll take care of this mess. Why don’t you go to the bathroom and clean off your jeans.”

So I headed to the bathroom. While I was in the bathroom I started thinking about the scene that had just played out in the deli and how it not only altered my day, but others around me. The guy behind me, the businessman, the deli manager, the clean up crew, my wife and family and as I was thinking about it, this thought came to me…

“Your mess is not your own.”

It wasn’t that I intentionally dropped the salad and decided to make a mess. It was an accident. But regardless of it being an accident or not, my accident effected other people around me. For a moment, I felt really guilty about it. In my mind I kept seeing an instant reply of messing up the guy’s jacket, the businessman’s shirt, the floor of deli and just the thought of burdening anybody with any aspect of my life starts to get me angry. My wife tells me it’s because I’m non-confrontational and a fellow Midwesterner friend of mine has told me that my “being prone to guilt complexes is a Midwest thing.” I don’t think it’s either. It’s more than a personality quirk. It’s a personal realization.

When Christians enter into authentic spiritual community with each other, the decisions that each person in that community makes affect everyone else in that community. In essence, the decisions you make in your life will indirectly affect others around you. Whether you want it to or not; whether you are thinking about it or not, it happens.

In the bible, Jonah receives instructions from God to ‘go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it’ and so what does Jonah do? He ‘ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish.’ For Jonah and many of us, because we are naturally self-centered and it’s not really on our personal radar, we don’t think that our day-to-day decisions affect anything other than our life. In the case of Jonah, it affected an entire ship of people that were headed to Tarshish.

“…he went aboard and sailed to Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. All the sailors were afraid and cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep.” (Jonah 1: 3-5 TNIV)

Have you ever known someone who professes to be a Christian and yet the actions and decisions they make in their life run contrary to that profession of faith? It’s as if they don’t see their own hypocrisy. More than that, they don’t even seem to care. Like Jonah, they are completely ambivalent to the situation. They don’t realize that the decisions that are making affect the community of people around them. It’s as if they are in a ‘deep sleep’.

Unlike the community of people around me at the deli that day, the sailors that we’re on the ship with Jonah were not nearly as understanding.
“The captain went to him and said, ‘How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish.’ Then the sailors said to each other, ‘Come let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.’ They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, ‘Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?’ He answered them, ‘I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’” (Jonah 1: 6-9 TNIV)

Jonah’s cover was blown. In that moment, Jonah was awakened to the reality that his decision to run from God could possibly cost him his own life and the life of these sailors. For some people, they do awaken to the reality of their life and how it is interconnected with the community of people around them. For others, they remain in a deep sleep and continue to live their life in a constant state of confusion. They ‘need more church in their life’ or they ask you to ‘pray for them’. It’s a spiritual mask for personal failure.

Your decisions are not your own, because your life is not your own.

If you claim to be a Christian, then you are claiming to be part of the family of God, through a relationship with Jesus. You surrender your life and your will to following Jesus because it is through His sacrifice on the cross that you are able to have a new life in Him. Your life is no longer yours, but His, Jesus. Your decision to follow Jesus brought about a celebration on earth through your water baptism and a celebration in heaven by glorifying God. Your decision to follow Jesus affected the community of people around. Doesn’t it make sense that a decision that is outside of following Jesus would also affect that same community?

How do you handle this?

What is the appropriate action to take?

Let’s look back at the scene with Jonah and the sailors.

“So they asked him, ‘What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?’
‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea…and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.’” (Jonah 1:11-12 TNIV)

The sailors get right to the point. They ask a very direct question because their life is on the line. If they don’t quickly get the root of the problem, the boat will crash and that’s the end for them. For the sailors, this was a matter of life or death.

Why isn’t it a matter of life or death for us?

Why don’t we have a sense of urgency?

More than the abdication of responsibility of the individual, I’m more concerned about the response of the community. The salvation of one of God’s children is on the line. If our salvation was important enough for Him to sacrifice Jesus, it should go without saying that it is important to you and me? We’re human and we will ‘all fall short’ in our following of Jesus. That’s where the real strength of an authentic spiritual community is. It’s in action. Not only in the decisions we make without God, but the decisions we make on behalf of God.

We have all been adopted into the family of God, sons and daughters. When we see a spiritual sister or brother making decision that we KNOW will affect our community we must act. We must intercede for the individual, the community and the Savior we profess to follow.

Your decision is not your own, it is His. Our salvation and our freedom as followers of Jesus have never been found in our independence from Him but in our complete dependence on Him. Helping people learn to process life this way and building communities of people that live this way, is the ‘kingdom among us’. It is the truth that ‘sets the captives free’.