What if there was more?

​I was driving home when I saw the lights.

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Fire trucks, police cruisers, red and blue light bouncing off the houses down the block. A structure fire in our neighborhood. I pulled over.

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I’m a certified community chaplain. I got out and found the incident commander and asked if there was anything I could do. He pointed me toward an ambulance parked at the edge of the scene.

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Inside was a man named Frank.

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Frank was wearing pajamas and a light jacket. That was everything he had. His house was gone. Two friends had been inside smoking meth, and that’s what started it. No wallet. No ID. No money. No phone. His whole life had been reduced to what he happened to be wearing when the smoke woke him up.

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I sat with him in the back of that ambulance for a while. Over the next two months, I showed up most days. His siblings wanted nothing to do with him. Frank was, in almost every meaningful sense, alone.

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Months later, Frank showed up at my church on a Sunday morning. He found a seat, the service started, and then I walked onto the stage to preach.

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He was thrown.

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When we talked afterward, he was honest with me in a way that stopped me cold. He wondered if any of it had been genuine — or if it had just been my job. If I had stopped that night because I was a pastor doing pastor things, and he had just been a ministry opportunity I’d been professionally trained to recognize.

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I told him: I didn’t stop that night because I was a pastor. I stopped because I was a neighbor. A man needed help. I could help. That’s where it started and that’s where it ended.

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But here’s what Frank’s question exposed, and why I think about it every time I open the Gospels:

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Most of us carry Frank’s suspicion into every encounter with Jesus. We want to believe the care is real. But we’ve been around religion long enough to wonder if it’s just the job. If Jesus shows up for us the way a professional shows up — with a role to fill, a box to check, a metric to hit. If the grace is genuine or institutional. If we’re being loved or managed.

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The Problem with Our Terms

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Before we follow Jesus into these stories, it’s worth naming how most of us actually try to meet him.

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Some of us approach Jesus the way we approach Wikipedia. We look him up. We gather selected facts. We read the summary at the top and call it enough. And if we don't like the details, we can change them. The Wikipedia Jesus is always at a safe distance. We can close the tab whenever we like.

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Some of us approach Jesus the way we approach social media. We let the feed shape our theology. We follow the loudest voices, inherit their certainties, absorb their tribal assumptions. The Social Media Jesus looks a lot like whoever we already agree with. He is endlessly confirming and never particularly surprising.

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And some of us approach Jesus the way we approach a dating app. We swipe toward the version that fits our preferences — the gentle teacher, the compassionate healer, the affirming presence — and we swipe away from the Jesus who overturned tables, called out hypocrisy, and said things that made his closest friends walk away scratching their heads. The Dating App Jesus never costs us anything. He’s a perfect match.

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But here’s the problem with all three approaches: they keep us in control.

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We decide what to include. We decide who gets to speak. We decide where the encounter ends.

The actual Jesus doesn’t work that way.