Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Looking back to this post, when I thought I would leave a friend because of his destructive behavior, it turned out that God told me a different thing. On one of my usual stop to the church's bookstore, I found this book: Where is your gutter? at the first pages, this book talked about where God leads us to go "outreaching" outside the community of people who already know God. It's the modern way of evangelism through building real relationships with people who otherwise will not know God. The book was written by CraigGross, a pastor and one of the founders of XXXChurch who boldly bring the Good News by going to one of the largest porn convention and built true relationships with people inside the industry.

What exactly is the gutter? The gutter is us. The gutter is where the sin is, it only means that the dirtier the gutter, the bigger call for love is for the people there. The gutter is a place where "christian" rarely go to because they don't want to be "associated" with it, since, they are christian and "live" a clean life. When in God's eye, we're all the same, we need grace from God, and the only one that will differentiate "us" and "them" is when one believe in Jesus as one savior. But that's not IT. Once a person is "saved", God wants us to go back to the gutter to call for more of His love ones. And sometimes He used the dirtiest ones, like Paul, to build His Kingdom on earth.

The book mentioned Craig's walk in his gutter to help us to understand and find our gutter. A lot of the stories shared how this approach is not widely "accepted" by other christians because it was "too dangerous" and is very close to temptations. I was thinking about this also and went back to the strategy WWJD (what would jesus do) and found that indeed, he made friends with the tax collector and showed grace to a woman who committed adultery. Craig's point is, we are called to be "in" the world, but not "of" the world. To be an effective gutter worker, we need to be real follower of Christ who understand the world but do not follow the world order. The other profound point was that, we need not to worry about being influenced by the world because when we're standing on Christ as the foundation, nothing will stop us. My example would be, who else if not U2 (I'll mention something else if I found any :)).

My first gutter will be me. The next one will be my friend (whom I tried to stay away from). Today, I told him and he's a good friend and I love him. And I am in the perfect gutter location in the church of broken people, sinners and losers. I live in the gutter of loss hope and inequality. I work in the gutter of inequality, broken confidence and disappointments.

My example of the gutter was one of the dance club in my neighborhood. I remember vividly when RedChetah was still open, three friends (two were a couple) and I went there. I honestly could not enjoy being in such a place. My couple friends were dancing, and two of us were sitting and "enjoyed" the music. There's nothing to enjoy, really, as far as I could remember, looking at drunk people dance on the table with minimum clothing was not interesting at all. The only thing I could think off was that, "God, this place desperately needs your love." And I didn't do anything to (I didn't realize back then;even now, I seem to have "no time" to jump in this gutter) the invitation of God to jump in the gutter and started a conversation with people around me, as Neal said, to know and be known, just to show our love to them.

One thing that Craig mentioned was, the approach Jesus took was ALWAYS grace and love, not condemnation. Yelling on the street telling people that they're going to hell was not what Jesus did. He came and ate with Zakeus, He asked people who never sin to throw the first stone to the woman who committed adultery.

This book really changed my perspective on "outreach". It was called outreach for a reason, to go out to the gutter, instead of "reachout", staying in the comfort zone to attract people to come in, when we're nowhere near where they are.