For Wilshire Baptist Church
Coming home from the Dallas Symphony on Friday night, we were in the dark on Kingsley Road just east of I-635 when we came upon a man in a wheelchair in the middle of the street. We slowed down to let him cross but stopped completely when we found he wasn’t crossing at all but was purposefully blocking traffic. What’s more, he was taunting and provoking us, wagging a finger at our car and the others beside and behind us as if calling us out for some undefined crime. To my knowledge, the only crime we had committed was living our lives.
And what about our lives? Earlier that evening, we had a hot dinner at home and then drove to a gated apartment to pick up a friend who was going to the symphony with us where the program was headlined by Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. We were there with tickets given by friends and found ourselves sitting in a loge box at the back center of the hall.
Before the music began, another couple came into the box, and for a few uncomfortable moments the woman insisted we were in their regular seats. There were only eight seats in the box — all with outstanding views and wonderful acoustics — and we told them we would be pleased to move. She said that wasn’t necessary but made the point again that those were their seats. They left the box before the end of the concert, which saved me from acting on the urge I contemplated during the program: After the final ovation, I would show her the small, polished-metal disk on the wall just outside the box inscribed with a seating chart indicating that, indeed, we were in the seats printed on our tickets.
And then we drove home and were confronted by the man in the wheelchair who was calling us out for something. I waited until he got out of our lane and stepped on the gas and passed him before he could block us again. Just before that encounter, we stopped at Andy’s Custard in Lake Highlands and picked up two of their frozen “concretes.” We ate them while watching the late news on TV to get the details on the coming freeze and then crawled into our warm bed.
Saturday we went about our usual Saturday business, checked on our mothers, and watched college basketball on TV. LeAnn cooked two large spaghetti casseroles that we took to the Salvation Army’s warming shelter near us in downtown Garland. Sunday we went to Wilshire for worship and the author fair afterward and then went home for lunch and watched the Dallas Cowboys collapse on TV.
Monday we went back to the Salvation Army and gave them several bags of packaged snacks we had bought for the author fair on Sunday. And then we went back to our warm home to work on the projects we do that pay the bills, give us a sense of purpose, provide some extra funds for entertaining ourselves and also for giving to the church and other causes we believe in.
I’m not liberal enough to feel overly convicted by our relative yet obvious affluence and privilege. And I’m not conservative enough to care only for what happens to me and mine. I live in the middle and feel both content about the life I have worked out for myself and yet troubled by the chronic inequities in our society that hold too many people back from having even just a fraction of what I have. I’m willing to surrender my box seats at the symphony and to provide food for the folks huddled at the warming shelter, but I’m not willing to open an empty room in my warm home to someone walking down the street toward that same shelter.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person hanging out in the soft, ambivalent middle of society, and I know there are no easy answers to our community problems. But maybe the first step is to at least be honest about where we sit on the continuum between affluence and poverty, generosity and selfishness, compassion and indifference, action and words, faith and distrust. Searching ourselves to discern where we sit may provide the context needed to step off in a direction toward actually doing something that makes a difference.