The Insider

She sat opposite me after getting her coffee from the kitchen. She looked brighter than I'd seen her before but still painted a fairly distressing picture.

She leaned on the arm of the black leather couch and looked directly at me.

This was Theresa, a girl who has been coming most days to Sanctuary 21 for a while now.

She is addicted to drugs and alcohol.

As I looked at her what did I see?

I will describe what I saw exactly as I saw it.

A pale, tired looking 26 year old. Her speech is badly slurred. She has dirty clothes, her arms are needle-scarred, the scars look livid and sore. Her hair is matted and out of shape. Her eyes yellow where the white should be with a vibrant blueness in the middle.

Your human side sees her as an "other". Your eyes want to look anywhere but straight at her.

On the face of it, she looked hopeless, a lost cause.

I guess a bit like people looking at Jesus hanging on a cross may have seen him. They probably didn't want to look him in the eye either.

Theresa looked at me with sad eyes. She has been doing really good recently. Wanting to know about Jesus, writing loads of prayers on our walls. Her prayers are devastatingly moving and challenging, in language probably offensive to lots of Christians. They are massively expressive and authentic.

But we've known for a little while she has a court case coming up this next week. And she believes she will probably end up in prison for a few months. Oh, she's been there before so usually I guess it would be no big deal to her really.

But this time she seemed to be resigned to it, but I think she was looking at this as the last time.

She is trying so hard to sort her life out.

She turned to me and said something which really startled me. "Will you and Dawn visit me?"

I said of course we would.

As I thought about that request I began to see beyond the confines of that question.

Will you visit me?

I felt the cry of every human heart in that request.

My mind went to the film Elephant man, to the scene where a mob corners John Merrick in a train station toilet, and the mob take the bag he covers his deformed head with, and they only see his deformity, which they think makes him different from them. He cries out, "I'm not an animal, I'm a human being."

And as Theresa asked, "will you visit me," I felt that same cry beyond her words. I am not a statistic, I am not a sex object, I'm not a drug addict, I'm not a none Christian, I have a mind, a have a soul, I feel things, I think things, I care. I am a human being.

Will you visit me?

I saw Jesus in Theresa.

The world tagged Jesus and still does with all kinds of labels.

And Jesus says, will you visit me? Will you help me? Will you tend to me?

I remember reading somewhere that one of the sisters that worked with Mother Theresa was asked while painstakingly picking maggots out of the infested wound of a person in her care, "How can you do that?" She looked up and said, "because I am doing it to Jesus."

When we see Jesus in others that's the moment we start to take back stolen ground, where we start to make all our mission, evangelism, activism, whatever other "ism" there is effective and useful.

If we can't see Jesus in others then none of that, yes none of that stuff will be useful to the kingdom at all?

Seeing Jesus in others is the powerful antidote to the evil that runs through the world.

He is the insider. He's inside us and he's inside others

He is in the cries of a messed up society. Not only should we hear the cries we should start seeing the cries too.

Do we just look at the world as it is and just criticise or even worse give up on it? Do we just let people like Theresa who are in trouble just fade away into the background where we don't have to see them?

Do we?

I don't think so.

The church shouldn't think so either.

Or?

Do we see Jesus in the tears of the broken or in cries of the messed up?

Seeing Jesus in others will turn everything this world has become on it's head.

Why?

Because Jesus is born in all of us as we see him in others.

This poem, I've no idea where it comes from, is scrawled on the wall of one of our prayer rooms at Sanctuary 21.

It says it all really.

You are the caller
You are the poor
You are the stranger at the door
You are the wanderer, the unfed
You are the homeless with no bed
You are the man driven insane
You are the child crying in pain
You are the other who comes to me
Open to another, you are born in me.

Theresa has gone now. I watched her go out into the street with her to go coffee that she always takes. I'm glad I see Jesus in her, because it kind of makes me surely know today that he is born in me.