OUR TOWN AND YOUR TOWN

Beside the fact that our little city has two state universities it is probably a typical American city for its size, and most of us who live here do not expect more than that. Our problems and possibilities are not all that different from where you reside. Most of our towns and cities are microcosms, more or less, in that they are miniatures of what goes on in the larger world, especially our own nation. We are not to forget, of course, that we belong to those nations of the northern hemisphere that comprise only one-third of the world’s population but possess 83% of its wealth. It is easy for one living in Denton, Texas in 1979 to be oblivious to the fact that two billion people in the world are in raw poverty.

Our city has its drama, so that even from where we sit one can get a view of “the church in the world,” which is the concern of at least one theological journal that comes to me from afar.

I was near our courthouse square a few weeks back purchasing some typing cartridges when I noticed a house ablaze only a few blocks away, in a section of town where two-story houses, once elegant, have been converted into multiple units, our “inner city” if we have such. There was that fleeting urge to hasten to the scene and be a bother to the emergency crew, which I could easily have done since the alarm had just sounded. I could have been at the scene as soon as the fire trucks and well before the police cordoned off the area. But my better judgment prevailed. I recalled how some psychologists theorize that we are inclined to “run to fires” from an instinct that goes back to our ancestors in primeval forests when fires were caused by lightning strikes.

I don’t like to stand and gawk at someone else’s tragedy, so I don’t become part of the audience at highway accidents and I stay away from fires, unless I have reason to believe that I can be of help. In most instances we can be of help by staying out of the way of those who are trained and equipped to render aid. I learned that lesson as a young man when I joined a massive crowd atop a railway underpass. A Mexican wanderer had been run down by a freight train and his body was strewn in pieces for hundreds of yards along the tracks. One of the trainmen shouted angrily to the sightseers, If you gawkers will get out of the way we’ll gather up this man’s body. I have never forgotten that stinging rebuke, so I stay away from that kind of entertainment.

But I learned from our local paper that there was more drama at that fire than one would suppose. A five-year old child died. Her older sister heeded her mother’s call and jumped into the arms of firemen from the second floor window, but she was afraid to jump. They found her body at the top of the stairwell. The fire was caused by a dry Christmas tree that should have long since been removed. As I read the story I could feel a tithing of the mother’s agony as she pleaded, probably all too frantically, for her baby to jump, and her distress when the child disappeared from the window into a big house full of fire. And the child’s fear, distress, and bewilderment. I found myself hoping that the smoke rendered her unconscious before the flames did their evil deed

The God of heaven knows about Denton, Texas, of course, and He loves our little children like He does those in your town. And He knew all about that fire and a family’s distress. And of course He could have caused the child to jump, or made it possible for a fireman to reach her. Or better still, He could have caused the dry tree to have been removed, or kept it from catching fire. And we would never have known that He intervened, and so we have no way of knowing how often He does intervene. Had He intervened the child would have lived on to maturity, presumedly, and what then? Maybe Socrates was right that it is better to die young than to live in our kind of a world, for some people at least.

I do not have a satisfactory theodicy, as the thologians call it, which is an answer as to why !he innocent (or the guilty for that matter) have to suffer. I accept in child-like trust (sort of) what I cannot understand or explain. I believe that that little child is somehow and somewhere within God’s enfolding love, and that the purpose that He has for that soul will in His own good grace be realized. It is God’s world, after all, and His purposes, however apparently thwarted by moral and natural evils, will eventually be accomplished.

Well, we have even that kind of drama and trauma in Denton, Texas, where you might suppose that nothing happens much, and it gets even more intense than that. If I went back enough years I could tell of the college girl who was delivered to her dormitory by a taxi and then disappeared forever. It was late at night, and the driver took her fare and presumed she entered the dorm. There was no one around that he noticed. That was a generation ago and they still don’t know what happened to her. But they know what happened to another of our coeds who was last seen as she entered her car on the parking lot. They found her mutilated body on a lonely road, as was the case of a little girl who disappeared one peaceful Sunday afternoon from a hamburger place. They found her body in a gravel pit near Dallas but not her abductor.

Only yesterday the police spotted four suspicious looking men inside a building. They were illegal aliens that had come to our little city all the way from the Mexican border. Their picture made the front page of our paper, showing them hauled away by the police, though they had committed no crime, save illegally entering our country in quest of employment. They were turned over to immigration authorities. What kind of country have we when we have to build walls and fences and station guards to keep people out while some countries do those things to keep people in?

The church is in our microcosm, and we believe that fact makes at least some difference. At our congregation on the Sunday following the tragic fire it was revealed that someone in our number had touched the life of the mother, a divorcee, who already had enough problems in her life without further tragedy. The Body remembered her in our prayers and someone was asked to call on her to see in what way we could be of help. We learned that her church and others responded to the tragedy so overwhelmingly that there was little left to be done.

Even as I write these words at high noon there are peacemakers at work bearing hot meals to shut-ins all over the city. There are many, many believers in this city who are mindful of the poor, the aged, the lonely, the disturbed, the sick, and the youth. I could name those that I know personally whose lives are full of good works, folk who do not let their left hand know what the right hand doeth.

It may not all be good. In our uneven world right here in Denton there is a Church of Christ that only this week announced that it had “marked” a sister church, one in Dallas, because it had veered from the faith, and thus proclaimed her as un-OK and not worthy of the goodwill of the faithful. Her wrong? She is cooperating with “the denominations” in reaching out to the untouchables in her not-so-little and not-so-nice world. But even here there are signs of change, for even within this church there are voices that are asking the right people the right questions, such as Now that we presume to pass judgment on our sister churches, not only in Denton but now also in Dallas, where does our jurisdiction end? Will we soon sit in judgment upon all churches everywhere, deciding who is and who is not worthy of fellowship?

This is to say that in our lovely little city “the company of the committed,” which is larger than you might think, not only has the world to reach out to with love, but the church as well.

It probably is not all that different from your town.—the Editor