Make a Move

Ace has always had an extremely high pain tolerance. He’s not the kid who will run over for a kiss on his boo-boo every time something happens.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been washing him up in his bedtime bath and found a great big scrape or bruise from something I had no idea had happened earlier that day!

So, when you mix that in with his minimal verbal communication, the day can hold some real surprises.

One morning we were out on our deck to soak in one of the last days of sunshine before the cold hit. Ace found a big bag of chalk and he and JJ kept busy drawing pictures all over the deck. I stayed right by JJ because he has a sneaky tendency to taste test the different chalk colors.

Ace was sitting in sight on the other side of the deck happily drawing circles big and small on the floor boards.

Finally, it was time for us to go inside and get cleaned up for lunch. I called for Ace to start picking up while I was stripping JJ down to a diaper to keep from all the chalk dust coming into the house. I glanced over and saw Ace had picked up the chalk around him, but seemed to just be sitting there now.

“Ace, come help pick the chalk up over here bub!”, I called. Usually he’s pretty good about helping clean up, but this time he wasn’t coming over.

Thinking he was just engrossed in his drawing, I kept calling him from the other side of the deck while undressing JJ, which is practically undressing Jell-O.

But Ace just looked at me and stayed right where he was.

Now a little frustrated that I needed to pick up JJ and go over to him, I walked over to see what was going on.

“What’s up, Ace? Do you hear me calling you?”

Ace looked up at me unmoved from his spot on the deck.

Then, I realized! He had wedged his fingers down in between the floor boards and his hand was now stuck between the slats!

He wasn’t coming to me because he literally couldn’t.

Ace doesn’t talk, and he wasn’t visibly upset. So the only way I would have known he needed help was if I went over to him, because he couldn’t come to me.

I maneuvered his wrist and freed his squished hand from the deck. Kissing his little fingers, I felt so bad for not coming over to him sooner!

A week or so later I was reading through the story of the Good Samaritan to prepare for this series of posts. I came across a part in the passage where this scene of Ace being stuck in the deck popped back in my mind.

“Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.” Luke 10:30-33 (ESV)

Who knows the reasons the priest and Levite didn’t go over to the beaten man when they saw him on the path? This is a story Jesus made up for teaching purposes. So to rack our brains trying to figure out every unwritten detail is unrealistic.

But, there is an important cultural piece that the crowd would have understood that we can easily miss with our own cultural eyes as we read it today.

As part of their duties, the priests and Levites of this time were commanded by God to not come in contact with a dead body. This would make them unclean and they’d need to go through a process of becoming clean again before they could continue doing their jobs as priests and Levites. (You can dive into the details of this more in Leviticus 22 and Numbers 19.)

So these men’s response to distance themselves from a man lying on the path in front of them could have been understandable if the man was dead. But the man was “half dead”, probably appearing to be dead, but in reality still alive.

If the priest and Levite were avoiding this man to keep within the laws for their people, then they would have just assumed the man was dead without actually going to check on him. The issue wasn’t that they were following God’s law for their lifestyle, but that they didn’t have compassion to even go over to the man to see if they could help him.

They assumed the man’s situation without coming over to him, and that kept them from seeing what was really going on and getting involved.

They assumed the situation based on how it looked from afar.

It’s easy for us to notice if something is off with someone. Maybe we notice they’ve stopped coming to gatherings where they usually are regular attenders. Or they aren’t connecting with people like they usually do. Or they look down or more unkempt than you typically see them.

Unfortunately, it’s also easy for us to stop there and assume what’s going on in their life and move on with ours. Or even assume that we can’t help them, or that they wouldn’t want our help if we offered.

So we keep our distance until they come to us.

But, truly hurting people are rarely going to walk up to us, because they can’t. They’re knocked down. They don’t have the energy to get back on their feet on their own. If they did, they would have done it already.

The ones who need someone the most usually don’t have the strength or energy to get up and get help for themselves.

Imagine if I just gave Ace space until he was ready to come to me. It wouldn’t have happened. He couldn’t! He was literally held down by his issue and needed someone’s help to get up.

We can’t love one another as Jesus calls us to if we’re not willing to walk towards those who are down and step into other people’s lives to see what’s going on.

All 3 of the men in this story noticed that the beaten man was there and that something was wrong.

All 3 men took action.

The difference came with which direction they chose once they saw him: toward or away.

The priest and Levite moved away from the man and walked by on the other side of the road.

But the Samaritan went toward him.

The only one who really knew what was going on with the beaten man was the Samaritan. He’s the only one who chose to step toward him and get close enough to see that he was severely wounded, but still alive.

We can sit and willingly wait all we want for hurting people to come to us for help, but sometimes in order to help the most hurting, we need to make the first move.

My prayer this week is that God would give us eyes to see the hurting, and courage to make a move toward them.

From one of His children to another,

Christi