I colored within the lines.

I remember it clearly, too. When I was a kid, I had my fancy box of 64 crayons, ready to take on any of the challenges presented to me by my coloring books.

And I would stare at a dizzying array of black lines on the paper, making out what appeared to be one of the many ubiquitous, relevant Disney characters of the time in some sort of fantastical freeze frame.

So, I’d take my crayons and steer them around the empty spaces of the page, making sure to keep each stroke within the black lines.

I colored within the lines. But I didn’t color everything, though.

Just the foreground. Because, as a young kid, the foreground was all that mattered to me. The foreground was right in front of me on the pages. The foreground had all the characters that made me laugh.

I paid genuine attention to the foreground. The sky didn’t matter so much. The clouds didn’t matter so much. The grass didn’t matter so much. They were just minor distractions.

The foreground was all that mattered.

So, Mickey or Goofy or Donald or Mowgli would end up being carefully colored. Whatever object(s) they were holding or using or breaking in the images were given color, too.

Meticulously.

Because, when I was a kid, it was a Mickey/Goofy/Donald/Mowgli world I was living in. So, my crayons stayed true to the lines in the foreground and I never thought twice about anything else.

Only later on did I realize that there was more to the coloring book pages than just the foreground.

I colored within the lines, and I felt good about it.

***

I’m afraid to label us “hypocrites.” It sounds mean. It evokes so much negativity.

I’ll posit, rather, that we’ve become “selective.” In every sense of the 9-letter word.

“Selective Christianity- coming to a church near you!”

That should be the slogan on our church websites and blogs. We should have t-shirts with those words emblazoned across our chests. Sell them for a couple of Hamiltons or a Jackson and we’ll be well on our way to funding our next church retreat or annual Holiday Talent Expo Extravaganza.

The point isn’t that retreats are purposeless. They’re not. Holiday talent show planning isn’t a colossal waste of our time… Sometimes, they can be genuinely entertaining events.

But Christianity, for us, has become something we’ve kept within the lines on the proverbial page.

And, to some degree, we’ve only paid attention to the “foreground” of that page. To what’s immediately around us. On Sundays. On our church pews. In our Sunday School classes.

To some degree, our home churches have become EVERYTHING WE KNOW about Christianity.

And that’s troubling.

Without realizing it, the 4 walls of our churches have demarcated where our Christianity begins and where our Christianity ends. They have marked where we need to look our best and where we need to act most appropriately. More disturbingly, they have marked where we need to “act” like Christians.

Our “Christian” interactions take place within the friendly confines of the 4 walls of our home churches. We smile at our home church peers. We get excited about our home church meetings. We get excited about our home church group activities/meals/events… And that’s the extent of our Christian living.

Our warm and genuine interactions with home church peers become cold and dispassionate dealings with people from other churches. We’re jovial and pleasant and lively when we’re surrounded by the people we see every Sunday, but we can’t even muster a smile at somebody from another church. We can’t stop talking to the person that sits next to us on our church pew, but we can’t bother saying “hello” to a person that doesn’t worship with us.

That’s not Christianity, folks. That’s not even close.

But, often times, we’d rather just remain perfectly content in our own little worlds. Worlds where the comforts of what surround us overshadow the Christianity we assume we’re living out.

There’s more to Christianity than the faces we’re so used to smiling at on Sundays. We just aren’t realizing it.

Treating everybody around us the same? That’s now a novelty.

We choose, instead, to stick to just the foreground of the page.

We choose to just color within the lines.

***

At some point, it began to bother me.

The foreground colors were vibrant. They were bright. They were detailed.

But the background was empty.

There were black and white lines creating mountains and valleys and rooms and cars and seafloors, but I had left it all untouched and uncolored during my hard-headed dedication to what was in the foreground.

Finally, I decided to lift my crayon off the foreground.

A smudge of blue or a swirl of gray or a hint of green easily took care of everything for me.

It was simple-minded, I know.

The background was important to me, but I didn’t grasp (at the time) what it meant to really care about the background. Random strokes of color sufficed for a time, but left the coloring book pages incomplete.

It took me some more time to figure out that I was missing out on the bigger, fuller picture.

***

It’s exciting to go on a mission trip to a foreign country.

At some point, foreign missions tugs at us.

The background really starts to matter to us.

We become dissatisfied with confining ourselves to local ministries, and we long to go and share God’s love with people that need it. Far, far away.

Sure, the foreground and the 4 walls of our local Christian habitats are important. But, we begin to realize that there is a world out there that really, truly needs us. Needs God.

So, we plan the mission trip with a group of people. Where to go. Where to stay. How long to stay there.

We gather all the resources that we can find around us (and whatever we’re allowed to bring with us). Medicines. Food. Drinks. Games.

We scour through songbooks so that we can have a collection of fun songs to teach the children we’ll inevitably meet when we step off the planes.

We rehearse the testimonies we’ll be sharing with the people we meet. 

And, then, when all the planning is done and the day finally arrives for us to head out there, we get on the planes with everything we’re allowed to take with us. We simmer with a nervous excitement, mentally preparing ourselves for the people we’ll meet and how we’ll share God’s love with them.

Finally, when all the turbulence is over and all the seat belts are finally allowed to be unbuckled, we get off the planes.

And something incredible happens.

We smile at everybody. We help everybody. We teach everybody. We tolerate everything. We care about everybody who comes to us with a malady or a problem or a scratch.

We become the perfect epitomes of what it truly means to be “Christian.”

Us. Every single one of us. Somehow, we figure it all out.

Deep in the heart of Third World Country X, we are the shining examples of what Christ expected of us a couple of millenniums ago when He commissioned us to go EVERYWHERE and tell EVERYBODY and be a light ALWAYS.

Us. Every single one of us.

And then, when we head back home after the trip is over, we go back to being our normal callous selves.

We can’t smile at the person working at Starbucks who’s struggling to get our supremely-complicated order right. You know what I mean. The Non-Tall, Non-Fat, Low-Sodium, Mocha Latte Herbal Chai Frappacappuccino… with 3 sugars, 2 Splendas, a shot of espresso, and a cup holder for our delicate hands.

We can’t walk over to help the old lady at the supermarket aisle who is reaching ever-so-desperately for her favorite box of cereal that sits on a shelf just out of her reach.

We can’t teach that young kid who asks us questions every week after our weekly Youth Meeting about the guitar we’re playing, why we purchased it, and what inspired us to learn to play it in the first place.

We can’t co-exist with people who hurt us in the past even though the grudges we’ve held should have dissipated in the years that passed us by.

Somehow, deep in the heart of Third World Country X, we figure it all out.

It’s as if we flip an internal switch that makes us “Christians” when we step foot off those planes.

We become hypocrites.

Whoops. I meant to say “selective.” That sounds nicer, after all.

I’m not condemning foreign missions. I’m not despising foreign aid. I’m not bashing people who truly desire to be a light in the world.

I am criticizing, however, the hypocrisy of charity. We aren’t Christians because we can be nice to people in another country. We are Christians when the testimony of others about us is THE SAME at our home churches, at schools, at workplaces, at local events, at the supermarket, at the coffee shops… AND in Third World Country X. We are Christians when the testimony of others about us is a resounding “this person is genuine, caring, loving and makes me feel like I am not completely and utterly useless in this world.” Everywhere.

I’m convinced that most of us only care about that testimony being positive at our home churches and on foreign missions.

If you can be a joy in your home church, and you can be a stalwart servant on a foreign mission, there is absolutely no excuse for not being the same EVERYWHERE you go.

At some point, the “background” and foreign-ness of the big picture begins to matter to us just as much as the “foreground” and local-ness does. This much is true. But, we forget to be Christians to everybody else around us.

And that makes us hypocrites.

Sorry. I slipped again. I meant to say “selective.”

***

I’m not sure when it happened. Or how it happened. Or if anybody made me do it.

But, at some point when I was a little older, I realized that the Disney characters needed some legitimate color around them. Because reckless blobs of color in the backgrounds of my coloring book pages no longer satisfied me.

I began relating the fanciful images on the pages in front of me to the actual world around me. The grass under my feet was green and not a careless blob of random colors. The pleasant sky was blue- most of the time- and not a messy blob of grays and blacks and whites.

So, I would color Mickey and Goofy and Donald and Mowgli carefully. And, then, I would color the ground they were standing on. I would color the sky above them. The cars they were driving. The rooms they were wreaking havoc in.

Not strokes of random color, mind you. Rather, they were meaningful and deliberate and carefully-planned. 

At some point when I was growing up, I no longer found it satisfactory to worry only about the foreground in my coloring books and artwork. And I no longer found it satisfactory to just kinda sorta care about the background.

Sure, it was a Mickey/Goofy/Donald/Mowgli world… But everything around them had color.

Everything around them deserved color.

The foreground was important, but the background mattered, too.

Only then was I able to step back from my desk, stare directly at my handiwork and actually appreciate the bigger picture in front of me.

***

Maybe it’s too late for the reversal of selectivity.

Maybe it’s too absurd to assume that Christians should actually try to be Christ-like EVERYWHERE.

Maybe it’s just easy for us to be positive and pleasant and Christ-like at our home churches. Maybe it’s important for us to be positive and pleasant and Christ-like miles away on a foreign mission.

But maybe it’s even more essential that EVERYONE we encounter deserves a smile. Deserves a helping hand. Deserves a “hello.”

Doesn’t EVERYBODY deserve to feel God’s love?

Instead of coldly walking past that person you kinda sorta don’t know from that church you kinda sorta don’t have many connections to, maybe you can just smile at them.

Instead of not forgiving the breaker of your high school heart after years and years of meticulous grudge-holding and petty snide remarks, maybe you can just smile at them.

Instead of waiting until the summer for the next exciting mission trip adventure to unleash everything that’s Christian about yourself, maybe you can bring joy to the people directly around you.

Instead of being the one person in your work/school group project that butts heads with everybody else around you, maybe you can be pleasant for once.

Because “Selective Christianity” just isn’t good enough anymore.

For anybody.

Because the “bigger picture” has more to do with the harmony of the background, foreground and everything in between and less to do with the hypocrisy we’ve all bought into.

We are all broken and battered and bruised and worn out. No matter what church you go to. No matter how many mission trips you embark on.

The beauty of the big picture is that we are made whole by an undeserved love.

I know we hear it all the time.

It’s time to start living like we actually get it.