Suburbia

Keep it clean, keep it neat, keep it nice, keep it safe, keep it whatever you have to as long as you don’t keep it real.

I think that would about sum up the lives of many out here in Suburbia. We are clean, we are neat, we are safe, we are kind, but we don’t have any idea what is real.

We live in our nice little subdivisions, driving our mini-vans to swim practice, Bashas’, and youth group, and talking to all our friends on Facebook, who are just like us, but never getting to the real.

Our heroes have to be clean, have to be neat, have to be nice, have to be safe, but not real. If they swear, they aren’t clean, if their life is in disarray, they’re not neat, if they struggle to love their enemies all the time, they’re not nice, if they run toward gunfire because they not only want to save lives but because they get a rush from it too, they aren’t safe. They wall off though, knowing we won’t love them if they show the real.

We say we want to love, we want to care, we want to comfort the hurting, and love the unlovable, but we don’t know what that means, we don’t know what that looks like, we don’t know what’s real.

One day a woman name Haggard woke up to the real. She was hit in the face with the real, once living the life of Suburbia, she thought life didn’t get any better than this, and fell to her knees when her hero wasn’t clean, wasn’t neat, wasn’t nice, wasn’t safe, and was finally real.

Be careful, the walls will crash down; the clean will become dirty, the neat washed away by the messy, the nice replaced by the ugly, the safe gone forever because the real was revealed. That is when truth is seen, and the facade can fall away, and Suburbia can die. It’s in the real we meet Jesus, and that is where He wants us to stay, not in some white washed world of our imagination, of our creation, but with Him, living in the lives of others, not because we are cleaner, or neater, or nicer, or safer, but because we are real.