Joshua, Geeky-Nerdese, and a Lonely Man

Mike Hosey, Elder

This past Monday my family sat in a local restaurant awaiting service.  Joshua was playing his portable video game when our waiter walked up and noticed him.

"What are you playing?" he asked. 

Josh answered that he was playing a particular version of a game based on a television cartoon that's popular with boys and adolescent males. 

At this moment a lively conversation erupted between this 20-something-year-old waiter and my 9-year-old son. 

It was really quite fascinating to watch and listen as these two persons separated by more than a decade in age began speaking fluently in some weird dialect of geeky-nerdese. Their conversation lasted a good five minutes or more, and in some places I have no idea what they actually said.

After the waiter left, Kelli, my wife, noted that our waiter was a nice man. Without skipping a beat, and immediately on the tails of my wife's utterance, Emily (my daughter) stated, "He's a very lonely man."

I found this humorous, of course. But I couldn't help but see the comparison between Emily's view of Joshua's conversation with the waiter, and the way an unbelieving world might view Christianity.

It's like this: those of us who know Jesus and who are committed to living in a church family have great joy because of knowing Jesus and having that family. We're excited about it, and we have a language all our own that the world outside our family can't really understand.

The language is functional, and in order to understand fully the world of Christianity, knowing that language is very helpful, and even unites different generations. It shouldn't be abandoned.

Still, the rest of the world doesn't know our joy and doesn't understand our language.  And because of this, those who might otherwise be interested in exploring our joy aren't.  To them, we sometimes look like lonely, nerdy wonks.

Jesus tells us to go to all the nations to teach them and make disciples (Matthew 28:19-20). To do this well, it helps if we can speak their language without abandoning our own. And the best way to do that is to be relational in the lives of those people (1 Cor 9:19-23).