Bus Stops a guest post by Mike Weisman
A man sits on a bench on a Tuesday evening. It’s been a hot day, so he opens a bottle of water and takes a couple of gulps. The other folks at the bus stop exchange a glance or two. One reads a newspaper, another spies his watch. Each one is ready to get home after a long day’s work. The bus ambles up the hill. The evening commuters board the bus, and the coach putters away, leaving behind a thin cloud of black smoke. The bench is empty, and so is the bus stop. It’s normal. A few steps behind the bench is something that can only be referred to as a “place”. It doesn’t have a name anymore, but it did once.
They used to call it “Golgatha”, the place where the man named Jesus died for the sins of the world.
Have you ever been to a place that held such a deep history of pain? I’m sure some of you have. Often in movies, these places are depicted as being “over there”, or “away” from everything else. Maybe it’s a city leveled by war, a part of town that’s been abandoned, or even just a room in an old house that no one's entered in years. Either way, something happened there a long time ago that caused people to leave, and now no one talks about it anymore.
That’s how I always pictured the death place of Christ. I often imagined it as a large dramatic cliff side, away from it all, off in the distance. No green, no people, only rock and waste and sadness. But when a friend of mine returning from Israel told me that the man who saved the cosmos died a few short steps away from a bus stop, I raged inside. It’s too normal. How did we allow a place so sacred to be overshadowed by something so unimportant as a bus stop? How did we allow the world to forget what happened there?
But we forget it all the time, don’t we?
We keep God and what he did “over there”, as if that’s the right and respectful thing to do. But because we keep Him away from it all, we forget. Sure, somewhere off on some rocky desolate cliff side halfway around the world, we know full well that Christ died for the murderers, the thieves, the heathens, of course…that story somehow makes sense. But He surely couldn’t have died for the boring story of a man on a Tuesday sitting at the bus stop waiting for a ride home…
That’s too normal.
And because it’s too normal, it’s unimportant.
And because it’s unimportant, it’s not a good story.
How sad it would be if Christ only died for the drama of it, for the ones that “really needed” it. Sure, it makes a ‘better’ story, but only a small fraction of each life actually makes it into the “good story” category. What we forget is that Christ died for all the in-betweens, the mundanes, the normals. What a glorious thing that is. To see that every dull moment, every average minute is a gift - infused and breathed on by the one who not only died for us but lives for us - is a good story in and of itself. The true shame would be to stand at all the boring places of our lives waiting for something bigger, something better, to come along, when all we must do is to sit down and realize that something holy is happening no matter where we are.
I do it all the time. Looking at my life and others' lives, incessantly comparing them, deliberately and depressingly evaluating them against some impossible standard of being “interesting”, thinking that my story must be good for it to matter to anyone. That somehow, at the end of time, all that’s been done in each life will be judged based on whether or not it would have been at the top of the NY TImes best-seller list.
But most often, the beautiful happens in the normal. Sure there are those “mountain-top” moments. And they are a different kind of gift. (Not to mention the less-sought after gifts from the valleys). But do not be tempted to look at an afternoon spent in the grocery store with your wife as something other than miraculous. Don’t think for a moment that an evening cleaning out the garage is less then lovely. Try not to believe the lie that being woken by your crying toddler at 3 AM is in no way heavenly. If all these things were anything but glories graciously given, He would not have died for you and me.
He died at a normal place. He lives in normal hearts. And how lovely it is to know that since He rose again, you and I can sit at a bus stop, and love every minute of it.
