Signposts part two

Something in my heart awakens every time I see one of the three highway signs marking my exit for home. On the eastbound Ford it's Lake Michigan Drive, on the westbound it's Lane Ave. If I'm coming from the south it's Wealthy Street off 131. Most of the time I don't even notice them. They are are there for others who may not know the way yet, but for me they slip into the backdrop of a drive my muscles take care of without much help from my brain.

When I do see them, I mean really see them, it's usually because I have been away from westown long enough that they seem novel again. And when that happens, something wakes up and I remember that I love this neighborhood. Not the idea of it, or what it represents, but the actual dirt and concrete of it. That ability to really see things carries me from the off ramp to home. Something triggers and it's like, Oh yeah, Wealthy Street. I notice the colors of the sign for the Big Chipper and the faded outline of "The Loading Zone" at Butterworth and Straight, even though it is now "The Hot Zone".

All that to say, when we talk about signposts for the Way of Jesus, we talk about finding them in a particular place, namely the places, we live and work and play in. Eugene Peterson speaks to this well in the book I mentioned last week, The Jesus Way. Here is how he starts the book.

"This is a conversation on the spirituality of the ways we go about following Jesus, the Way. The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular, local.

The ways employed in our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques, general guidelines, information detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face and the familiar street...

This is wrong thinking, and wrong living. Jesus is an alternative to the dominant ways of the worlds, not a supplement to them. We cannot use impersonal means to do or say a personal thing - and the gospel is personal or it is nothing."

This is one of the main reasons Jen and I fell in love with Servant's. This church is bound by a sense of common mission to a particular place. It is westown in all of her complexities and diversity that we find ourselves and it is in this neighborhood that we walk out our journeys on the Way.

Last week I asked about our personal signposts, the things that help us find and walk on the Way of Jesus. This week I wonder how we, as the church, stand as a signposts for the "recognizable face and familiar street." How do we stand as markers of the Way for the neighbor we shovel snow by and the cashier in the grocery store? How do we encourage others to join in the journey?


Let's continue to get momentum going in the comments here. Thanks for the responses last week, both on the blog and in person. Sorry for the delay on comments. I have to moderate them to prevent unsavory spam from popping up, so once you post a comment I get an e-mail where I must approve the comment before it is posted. I try to check a couple times a day.