i sleep in a bed. she sleeps on the porch.

The past few weeks have been so full. It is hard to try to describe them in one short reflection and to tie all the experiences together. I have tried to reflect somewhat, but I would like to share with you an experience I had the other day that has been making me think.

I was doing dishes in the sink after baking bread. No one was in the office yet, as it was only 11 o’clock. I was getting frustrated by the fruit flies (summer always brings fruit flies), and so after setting a trap (which has been very effective) I opened the back door to take out the trash. I was surprised and slightly taken aback when I noticed someone sleeping on the back porch. It was a woman from church, and so after I had gotten over my shock I said good morning to her.

It had been raining during the night, and she told me that sometimes Rev. Choi lets her sleep on the porch if she has nowhere else to go. I recognized her from church and she wasn’t hurting anyone by sleeping on the porch, and so that was a good enough explanation for me. I asked if I could get by to take out the trash. And then I offered her water or breakfast. She asked for left over watermelon, and if she could use the washroom. I let her in to use the toilet and dished her out the watermelon, left over from Sunday’s service, which I had been trying to finish before it went bad. After she went back outside, I gave her the watermelon on a plastic plate, and she made herself comfortable and got ready to go back to sleep.

I told her to let me know if she needed anything else, and then closed and locked the back door. As I locked her out of the warm kitchen, where my bread was rising on the counter, I thought about the difference between us. I fixed myself a snack from the leftovers of Sunday’s lunch for the homeless. I walked upstairs to my room, with a bed and a computer, to a place I am staying for free out of the rain and the heat, with food provided. And I wondered about what makes us different. Is it the color of our skin? The circumstance of our family situation? Why do I get to live inside, have free reign of the building and the fridge, never ask permission to use the toilet, use wi-fi to connect to family and friends, have the status of intern in this church community/mission? What separates us?

This, in its garbled form, is something I have been reflecting on recently. What gives me the right to come to this church community and to serve ‘them’, this woman and others like her, as if I am somehow better than them? What separates us? Not very much, I would like to think.

I have been reflecting on Romans 12 lately. It is the topic of my sermon on Sunday. It is about how to be a community together. To “not be conformed to this world,” to be “one body with many members,” to “let love be genuine,” to “extend hospitality to strangers,” and to “live peaceably with all.” It’s pretty straight forward. And very beautiful.

But the verse that has stood out the most to me over the past 6 weeks is this one: “for by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another. We have gifts given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter; in exhortation; the giver, in generosity’ the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.” (Romans 12:3-8).

And I’m not sure yet how to wrap those two thoughts together. They fit. I know they do. But they are messy in my head still. We are members of one body, her and I. So why is my life plump and she sleep on the porch? I am not any better than her, even if I have different gifts. So what keeps us in different circumstances?