Dl Mayfield Quotes

Jesus knew what it meant to never be at home in your own place.

it was never my job to save, or convert, but rather to simply show up and believe.

Eventually, I learned to listen, which is without a doubt the most important missionary skill.

I used to want to witness to people, to tell them the story of God in digestible pieces, to win them over to my side. But more and more I am hearing the still small voice calling me to be the witness. To live in proximity to pain and suffering and injustice instead of high-tailing it to a more calm and isolated life. To live with eyes wide open on the edges of our world, the margins of our society

Love God, love your neighbor, Jesus said, a perfect sound bite for the ages. But did Christ know how complicated my neighbors were? How hard they were to love sometimes? How much easier it is to surround myself with people who look and think and act like me, to love only myself? Yes, yes, yes, he does, but he is polite and firm in his response. A messy, present, incarnational love is the simplest and hardest call of all, the call that all of us were created to follow.

I thought about the famous line from indigenous Australian writer and activist Lilla Watson, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Asking people to do good, to give, to be charitable, becomes easy in these kinds of societies; asking them to be neighbors with those they most wish to help is not, since it points out an inconvenient truth that most of us try hard to forget all the time: some of us have worked hard to make sure we are only neighbors with certain kinds of people, and now we have to live with the results.

All I ever wanted was to be persecuted for righteousness’s sake, to be a martyr for Jesus, to stoically endure doors slammed in my face, to persevere until the end. But all I really ever wanted was to love on my terms, in a way that elevated me above my neighbor, distinguished me as good and holy, receiving accolades in a most humble way. All I ever wanted to do was oppress people, in the kindest way possible.

It is easier to leave right after the prayers are prayed, right after somebody meets Jesus, while the tears are still fresh and the hope is solid enough to cut with a knife. While everyone is doing okay, taking pictures that we can take home and cling to, framing the ones where everyone is smiling. We, the do-gooders, stay for a short while, because we crave the knowledge that we have done something of value in the world. And we leave before we have a chance to see how poor in relationships we really are.

Slowly, I started to enter more fully into the world of my refugee friends. As the days and months blended into years, I experienced strange paradoxes. The more I failed to communicate the love of God to my friends, the more I experienced it for myself. The more overwhelmed I felt as I became involved in the myriad of problems facing my friends who experience poverty in America, the less pressure I felt to attain success or wealth or prestige. And the more my world started to expand at my periphery, the more it became clear that life was more beautiful and more terrible than I had been told. The

William Cavanaugh believes that desire in a consumeristic society keeps us distracted from the desires of those who are truly hungry.8 It numbs us not only by encouraging us to want more and more but also by negating our God-given desire to work toward the common good. Consumeristic societies, like the one I live in, only exist by making the individual supreme. Everywhere we look there are people who are seen by God in an empire that despises and devalues them, even as it exploits them for profit. Learning not just to see but to learn from them is the only cure I know for finding our way out of the never-ending maze of the American Dream.

God loves everybody, exactly the same. No matter what you do. If you grew up like me, then you are waiting for the asterisk to that sentence. Sure, God loves everybody the same. *But he really likes it when you go to Africa. Or start a food kitchen. Or adopt through foster care. Or buy cool, overpriced shoes that may or may not give an orphan in some nameless country a complimentary pair. Or turn your TV into a garden for succulents. Or whatever it is that we believe we must do in order to be fully loved. God took away my asterisk, and now I don’t know how to classify myself anymore. I’m just a sheep of his hand, and it is more lowly and lovely than I could have ever imagined.

Early on I realized the people I most mirrored in the Bible were those blasted Pharisees, the ones who tried so hard their entire lives to be good, to work hard, to correct the thinking of others. They too were probably grimly proud of the way they memorized passages of scripture, how they could out-argue anyone, how they kept their society neat and clean of any moral gray. And so when I was in Bible college, when I read and read and read the words of Jesus, when I saw how his life was a continuous announcement of some mysterious amorphous thing called the kingdom of God, I became very scared indeed— because I didn’t understand what the good news of the kingdom was, or how to bring it to earth, or how to be a Christian in a world that doesn’t value taking care of others.

Some of the most unrecognized ministries are my favorite kind. Like the ministry of playing video games with awkward adolescent boys. The ministry of bringing takeout food to people whose baby is very sick in the hospital. The ministry of picking up empty chip wrappers at the park. The ministry of sending postcards. The ministry of sitting in silence with someone in the psych ward. The ministry of sending hilarious and inspirational text messages. The ministry of washing dishes without being asked. The ministry of flower gardening. The ministry of not laughing at teenagers when they talk about their relationship crises. The ministry of making an excellent cup of coffee. The ministry of drinking a terrible cup of coffee with a bright smile. The ministry of noticing beauty everywhere - in fabrics, in art, and in the wilderness.

This is actually pretty convenient theology: believe in Jesus, go to heaven. However, reading Jesus’s words it becomes apparent that the kingdom is very much about the here and now, changing the world to reflect what God desires: the oppressed would have justice, the poor would be fed, and the stateless wanderers would be taken care of. When taken literally, that “kingdom” Jesus was always talking about becomes very inconvenient indeed, primarily because we are supposed to be the ones bringing it.

When people of privilege pursue affluence, autonomy, safety, and power above everything else, not only do they miss out on the liberating and restorative work of Jesus, but they participate in greater inequality, segregation, and suffering for the most marginalized people in their community. When people of means pursue what is best for them and their own in an unequal society, their actions inevitably harm the common good. People like myself end up disobeying the central commandment of Jesus - to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves - all in the name of pursuing a dream life for ourselves.

Theologian Lisa Sharon Harper writes that “Shalom is what the kingdom of God smells like.

We Who do not own ourselves, being free, Own by theft what belongs to God, To the living world, and equally To us all WENDELL BERRY

For (D.L) Mayfield, "Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship - full of questioning - of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don't think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.

The more I try to follow Jesus, the more I realize that if the gospel isn't good news for the poor, the imprisoned, the brokenhearted, and the oppressed, then it isn't good news for me either.

I used to think the goal of my life was to convert others. I didn’t feel too badly about it, either. I was so sure that I had what these folks needed, that I had been graced with all of the right answers. The more I hung around on the periphery, the more my mission field started to unfold into complex backgrounds and the more all of history started to seem like a never-ending cycle of conversion.