God is always inviting even if we aren't always responding

​Several weeks ago, I sat in a church service. Part of the message that day troubled me. A day later- long after I left the building - it was still troubling me. So I emailed the pastor and expressed my concern.

I'm not a regular at this church. I'm just a sinner roaming in off the streets. So when the pastor's response was to invite me to have coffee with him, it caught me off guard.

At the heart of what I expressed to the pastor was my fear that the bigger church - not just his church - is addressing 'sin' as the wrong choices bad people make and not the choices good people make to cope with voids and hurts in their lives.

That's not my attempt to make excuses for good people, it's an attempt to help us get better at helping our brothers and sisters fill voids and cure hurts.

The grand consequence of that bad people approach - in my opinion - we are trying to force a relationship with God that relies on obedience instead of inviting the church to meet one another in their hurts. Because it's there - in our shared pain - that I believe we will ultimately discover the truest image of God. The truest form of relationship.

With God - with one another. They are one in the same.

The pastor listened to me. I have incredible respect for someone whose response to a stranger's email is let's have coffee. I have even more respect for a pastor who says, at the heart of our church mission is connecting one another. So I want to gather perspectives on how we can do it better.

Yesterday, I had lunch with this pastor. Joining us this time was a pastor on staff who leads efforts to build small life groups in the church. And for an hour and a half, we talked about relationships. Inside the church and out.

No one in this conversation was put in a position of saying, you are right. Because no one came to the conversation wanting to prove anything, but to get better at connecting one another in a way that resembles the way God wants to be connected to us.

I walked away from lunch with a full heart. I walked away with incredible respect for two local pastors. And I walked away knowing the words I heard in a message several weeks ago were not disturbing words at all, they were an invitation from God. That was God dialing my number and begging me to pick up the phone.

His invitations are everywhere. Just because we don't pick up the phone doesn't mean he isn't calling. Because He is.

It's too easy to write off the things we hear that disturb us as wrong, when it's possible they are an invitation. An invitation to be curious about one another. A curiosity that leads us to truly understand God in a way we could never understand him in one Sunday message.

If you hear something disturbing today, it may not be an invitation to lash out, but to enter in...