Stools are easier to pull up than pews…

// June 11th, 2009 // OUT LOUD THOUGHTS

Yesterday, Jessica and I managed to sneak out of the house and go to the Farmer’s Market in OB.

The Farmer’s Market is every Wednesday, and it is one of the most well known things about Ocean Beach.  Food, crafts, and llama rides is one way to describe it.

Jessica and I love to just walk around and be surrounded with the eclectic mass of humanity.  It’s wonderful and beautiful.  We just find ourselves at home.

Coming off my foot casualty – and really not knowing whether it is indeed fractured or not – we ducked into an Irish Pub that has always grabbed my attention whenever I’m on Newport Ave.

Jessica and grabbed a stool next to the glassless, screenless window which provides an invitation for the rest of the world to be a part of what is going on inside.  I can’t help but to think that it’s a great testimony to the rest of the world: here’s who we are – we’ve nothing to hide.

In mere moments we were in conversation with a bar maid (hope that’s politically correct) who didn’t think I could possibly know where she was from in Indiana.  Funny thing is, I have friends who are from that precisely that little town no one’s heard of.  She’s been in OB for 6 months.

The Yankees game was on a few of the flat screens and the guy next to me cheered them in understated kinds of ways.  He’s from New York originally – the accent still lingering.  He misses the old Yankee Stadium, described its mystique and the feeling of history as he walked into its bowels.  But he wasn’t bitter.

It’s a phenomenal feeling to be fully alive.  To love and embrace life around us.  To join people exactly where they are living.  I sensed the presence of God so strongly in that place.  Coming from a background where we didn’t even go to Pizza Hut because they served beer, I wasn’t in the least conflicted.

I wasn’t because I know Jesus wasn’t.  He was there with me.

As bad as some people want Jesus to be awkward in society and as much as we paint pictures of His followers holed up in places that are separate from the world, Scripture tells of a Jesus who was all to familiar with the margins, the places forgotten, but mostly the people who were on the outside.

It was so difficult for the religious to embrace Him because He just kept doing things He wasn’t supposed to do.  He was just too familiar with brokenness.  He was too familiar to those kinds of people.  He was just too….familiar, really.

“If He was really a prophet, He’d know who He was hanging out with.”  Luke 7:36-50 (slight paraphrase)

Yep.  That’s my Jesus – at home being God and man.

And I’m trying to join Him in those places we’ve often forgotten.  The steps of Jesus are often pretty dangerous to follow because some of the things that you have to do aren’t just foolish in the eyes of the world, they are foolish in the eyes of the Church as well.

So I snapped this picture with my phone yesterday: a cross emblazoned on wood.

And in the wider shot, we find something that seemingly doesn’t belong: a pew from a church with a table pulled up to it with 2 guys with 2 Heineken’s.

I wondered about the story of these pews.  Were they once a part of a now-defunct church?  What sermons were heard by the people who sat in them?  Is the church still going but the pews were no longer welcome?

Funny how the cross blends in and finds a home in that bar.
Funny how Jesus always left the 99.
Funny how the 99 didn’t follow Him.
Funny how the presence of God left the temple only to be found in “unholy” places.
Funny how Jesus is still showing up wherever He can find a resting place – IN US {the living temple}

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