a "bad" neighborhood

How does our vocabulary affect our actions? Change our behaviors? Mold our living?

When we were in Boston the other week, I often heard people mention things about "bad neighborhoods." Comments like "we should be careful," or "it feels kind of scary," or "is this safe."

(Before I go any further, let me mention that safety is right at the top of my priority list as a Jr. High youth pastor. So don't think that I'm ignoring safety in the following comments.)

I was driving through one such neighborhood by myself one evening, going to pick up a group of our students from a house. All the warnings were ringing in the back of my head. And then it struck me. The houses I was driving in front of...people lived in them. The people I was passing on their sidewalks...they were real. People considered this neighborhood home. It was where they woke up in the morning. It was a place they couldn't "avoid after dark." It was streets on which their dreams began and, yes, sometimes ended. It was where they were involved in mundane things like brushing their teeth and hoping that some girl likes them. Where they paid bills and came home from work to.

I live in a bubble. One where I get to choose when I want to be "safe" or not and how "safe" I want to be. The lives that these people may be experiencing are significantly different than mine...I watched a drug deal go down as I drove further on. But God's love isn't somehow different for these people. And, in some sense, I don't think he particularly cares about how safe I feel, but more about how much I'll embrace that love. Embrace that love by embracing others. I was struck that I don't think Christ would view a city as "safe" neighborhoods and "unsafe" neighborhoods...but more as a load of people love on. And it's hard to embrace someone fromo a distance.