“Play it cool,” I thought, as I fumbled along the unfinished
road with the dignified wife of the former Amazon Governor. She in her
high-heels and me in my flip-flops plodding our way to the notary public just
five minutes out from closing time.
“What in the world am I doooooing??” I thought to myself as
I signed the papers for a one-year-lease on a massive leap of faith we had only
brain-stormed and kitchen-tested up until this point.
“This is it. We have officially lost our minds.”
She handed me the key to our newly rented space with a
dubious smile and I took it about as uncertain as Peter must have been those
moments before his feet touched solid water.
What followed was a whirlwind of paperwork and fees and
building and sweating and juggling timeframes and learning legal requirements
and hiring and little sleep.
Then suddenly, there it was: The Donut Company. Exactly as Richard had sketched
out on a piece of paper in the middle of the big empty white space was an
incredible testament of God’s power and creativity. Truly a demonstration of
His strength at work in us because I can say with certainty it was only by His
provision and might that we went from Googling a recipe to opening an
incredible, beautiful donut shop in a matter of four months.
Un.be.liev.a.ble.
But as exhausting and draining it was to build out a shop,
to navigate the waters of employee rights and accounting requirements and legal
jargon in your second language, to figure out where in the world to buy
industrial kitchen equipment in the middle of the jungle, to figure out
ingredients and schedules and suppliers and operate new machinery, and so on
and on, the true challenge was yet to come.
Because the point in our shop wasn’t just to provide a few
locals a job or to offer a tasty treat to native residents of this jungle town.
Our main objective was much more than affording tourists a trendy escape on
their Amazon expedition.
Our whole purpose is this: to love God and love others. In a
town saturated with churches, we want a place for the unchurched.
It’s the opposite of what we feel naturally inclined to do. But
we are firm believers that if you are surrounded by people who look, think,
act, talk, and live exactly like you, you’re doing it all wrong.
Because we can shout all day long to a broken world that
they are lost and going to Hell. But they are dead. And dead men, well, they
have trouble hearing.
So the language we’ve been commissioned with speaking is
Love. It’s this crazy, unorthodox, supernatural language.
Naturally, some people don’t like the way it sounds. They
say it sounds like we’re hippies, condoning sin and living freely, everyone
doing as they please.
I propose those people haven’t quite grasped what true love
looks like. Because love requires a lot more dying to self and a lot less being
right. It requires a lot of sacrifice with no promise to see the fruit. It
requires massive amounts of humility and shows so much mercy and grace it’s
painful at times.
Love is hard. It can be this strange conundrum of sharing a
meal with someone who lives completely contrary to your convictions and
laughing together over a surprise common ground. And it is those unexpected
similarities that slowly break down the walls and lead to open doors and
liberating conversations of how Jesus changed our world and opened our eyes
when we were blind, too, and now we see so clearly that we are all just alike
at our core—broken people in need of a Healer. Maybe our sins look different
than theirs. Perhaps we don’t have the same struggles. Our backgrounds are
different. Our cultures varied. But we are all the same. We all need Love.
And loving hurts. Often. When you give your life to the
wounded, you’ll likely be bruised. People you pour your heart and soul into
will walk away seemingly unchanged, resolute in their habits. We’ve cried a lot
over relationships ended despite our best (though imperfect) efforts to
love. And we’ve been labeled a plethora
of things for our open door approach. We’ve had to let employees go who just
couldn’t accept graceful correction. We have had people we considered friends
all but spit in our face when we stood firm on Love. Because sometimes loving
means correcting and sometimes it means forgiving when it’s so hard to do and
sometimes it means watching them walk away but still keeping the door open wide
just in case they return.
Love bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all
things. Endures all things.
It never fails.
Which requires time. It will take sacrifice. It will demand
humility and forgiveness and sacrifice and dying daily.
But over time, if we’re patient, we may start to see little
buds of fruit. When that atheist boy comes back to the shop again and again
because “it’s just so different here”. When that girl who cuts herself sits
down across from your employee who grew up fatherless, too, just to talk it out
because “he’s the only one who will listen”. When that same employee says “tell
me more about what it means to love others” because all he’s ever felt in the institutional
church is “not good enough and condemnation” and he, too, wants to love others
well. When those well-to-do clients are baffled that we would use the profits
from the shop to love orphans in a neighboring town. When locals see us loving
the homeless on the streets. When we take in refugees and fight for them. When
we treat the nomadic hippies like actual human beings.
Suddenly it’s quiet here. Defenses start to fall. Hearts are
softened. Ears are opened. And humility and grace finally get a platform to
speak.
So to those who would never set foot in a building under a
steeple? Come on in. Those who look different than they “should”? There’s no
dresscode here. The crazy guy who everyone ignores? How’s a free donut a day
sound? The prostitute working late? Welcome. The homosexuals, the fatherless,
the lonely, the cutters, the agnostics, the atheists, the broken, the
overachievers, the young families, the elderly couples, the enthusiastic teens,
the Average Joe—this place is for you.
Because we love you. And we believe there is hope to be
found for each and every one of us and that Hope is true Love and His name is
Jesus. He’ll be the one to do the changing. Love will mark you in a way that
you can’t help but share.
Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love
one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
Fortunately, He loved freely. He didn’t require us to change
first and He didn’t shout condemnation to the lost. He shouted grace and mercy,
forgiveness and freedom.
He went on to say, “By this all people will know that you
are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
He didn’t say they’d know because we had it right. He didn’t
even say they’d know by how good we were. It’s love that they would hear first.
It looks a lot like sitting across the table and talking. It
looks a lot like, “Welcome. How can we serve you?”
It looks a lot like the Kingdom of God, right here.
This is a multi-post series. See His Kingdom, Right Here {Part One} and {Part 3}.
