We Can’t Afford to Ignore People

Strangers are strange. If they are not strange, we would call them normalers.

My general disposition to 99.9% of strangers is to ignore them. I live in Austin, TX. That is acceptable and encouraged social behavior in 2014.

In 1992, there was a basketball team filled with non-strangers. They were the most recognizable athletes in the world. When you think of that team, one conjures images of Michael Jordan tearing through opposing players like Godzilla trampling Japanese buildings. We remember Magic Johnson orchestrating plays on the court like Philip Glass conducting at Carnegie Hall. However, perhaps the most remarkable individual achievement that Olympics came from John Stockton, the NBA’s all time leader in assists. His accomplishment came not from his basketball genius but his God given physical abilities. He did what Jordan, Magic and Bird could only dream of. John Stockton did what Charles Barkley would have given piles of cash to be able to do. Stockton walked the crowded streets of Barcelona completely unnoticed. He became one of the 99.9%.

There is footage from John Stockton’s home video camera talking to an American woman, wearing an American flag, adorned with an American Dream Team t-shirt with John Stockton’s American face on it. In this clip, she is talking to Stockton without realizing Stockton was Stockton. This made John Stockton the envy of the Dream Team.

How could one of the Beatles of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics be a disregarded stranger on the streets? Perhaps they had a preconceived notion of what an NBA player looks like. Since Stockton didn’t fit that mold, he could walk with them and among them and they ignored him.

Centuries earlier, two men were walking and carrying a conversation one Sunday. They recounted the weekend’s current events. The most controversial spiritual teacher of their day was sentenced to capital punishment. Rumors were, that he, somehow came to life 72 hours after the execution. This was the stuff of Zombie novels. As they deliberated over this outrageous story, a third stranger joined the conversation and was not ignored. He was subsequently invited to dinner. This stranger started the meal with bread and words of gratitude and they suddenly recognized that it was God. They had walked with God. Now they were eating with God. These two men made the strange, normal and they met God.

I wonder how many people ignored Jesus on that same day on that same road. How many others made him one of the 99.9%.

I wonder if Jesus started humming Matt Berninger’s lyrics:

You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends

When you pass them at night under the silvery Citibank lights

Arm in arm in arm and eyes and eyes glazing under

The Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia, which literally means “love of the stranger.” The German word is more fun to say - Gastfreundschaft, which means, “friendship for the stranger”.

In 2014, in Austin, TX I am learning to un-ignore the 99.9%.

I may even accidentally befriend God along the way.