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I have a family and I have friends, but I spend so much time amid strangers. More than I ever did before. In my old life, I drove everywhere. I was in my own private universe, and everyone else was as well. Interactions with other people, during transit, came at a highly insulated remove—at stoplights, and so on, and often not even then. Here in New York, a subway ride puts me in the middle of a little temporary society with people from anywhere you can possibly imagine. Even a taxi can be a window to Vietnam, to 1950’s Brooklyn, to Venice, to the Congo, to Bombay, Pakistan, Queens. Any exotic location like that. The jedi mind trick is recalling that I too am a stranger. I appear to those strangers as a stranger myself. To many I must seem driven and ambitious, as I hustle off to work. I must seem obsessed with being connected as I chatter on my cell phone to a friend while I whisper my coffee order to the poor Starbuck’s employee. I must seem closed to many I see, as I look straight ahead, move forward. I must seem like an lien from another planet with my stroller and bjorn and diaper bag—the distant, exotic planet of Parenthood. It can be a very lonely feeling be in New York. Yet the truth is that I myself contribute to the city’s loneliness. I don’t often feel lonely walking down the street, or on the subway—I like the anonymity of being lost in a crowd. I have my peeps at home, anyway, and my friends at work and elsewhere. I like the variety, the comedy, the everyday pageantry of New York. I try to imagine what Jesus would do as he walked the city. Would he stop people and strike up conversations? I have to believe he would. And that he would look people in the eye whenever possible. He would be spotted as a tourist, right away! In his own city, Jerusalem, the streets are narrow and winding. They open into a soukh, or various steps and gardens and gates. It is a walled city, a fortress city. The walls of Jerusalem were built to keep the wilderness at bay, the void, the desert, the unknown, the attackers and strangers and wild animals. There is not room for everyday pageantry of the same magnitude in Jerusalem as there is here in New York, with its wide streets and endless pedestrian traffic. The walls of my city are different than Jerusalem; but they serve much the same purpose. They are walls I carry and raise as I go. The walls are my headphones, or my earbuds, as the Apple parlance goes. My books or newspapers. My thousand yard stare. My walking pace. My exhaustion, evident on my face as I avoid the conversation, the need, the opportunity. I am always asking to see God. I am always pestering him about answering my prayers, my specific prayers. I want him to do things in my life. I want to see his work. Yet at the same time I ask to see God, I want to conveniently forget that he appears all around me in his image. I do not seek him there because I fear what it will cost. The beauty of nature, of creation, does not ask much of me except to let it be. Now that we have subdued the earth, and with a vengeance, creation in nature only gives; in that sense nature can be seen as an expression of agape love, the divine love. But the image of God is philos, the love of friendship, of brothers. The love that takes as well as receives. It’s this love God wants me to grow in. And I can feel him waiting for me. I have more to give than I wish to give. The city is dying of thirst, a thirst I can succumb to myself. In Jesus Christ I have the only water that will quench this thirst, and yet I am reluctant to give it! I pray God will forgive me, that he will change my heart to become a heart of giving. —TD
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