“What? How come?” his wife must have asked. The simple answer is,
he probably didn’t know. The real answer was that God was doing
something different in someone else’s life than he was in their lives, and
what He was doing intersected the pig farmer’s life in a big way.
God knows we’re easily confused and often wayward, and He pursues
us with love anyway. I think He wants us to see things the way He does,
and it’s not going to happen from the top floor of our castles. It will
happen at the ground level of grace. And it’s going to take a lot of grace
to accept that sometimes we’re the person on the other side of the lake,
and other times we’re the pig farmer.
God wants me to love the ones I don’t understand, to get to know their
names. To invite them to do things with me. To go and find the ones
everyone has shunned and turned away. To see them as my neighbors
even if we are in totally different places. You’ll be able to spot people
who are becoming love because they want to build kingdoms, not castles.
They fill their lives with people who don’t look like them or act like them
or even believe the same things as them. They treat them with love and
respect and are more eager to learn from them than presume they have
something to teach.
There’s a tradition at Disney most people don’t know about. The windows
in the second-story shops are dedicated to people who helped build the
kingdom there. At Disneyland in Southern California, I found a window
across from the Jungle Cruise for a guy named Harper Goff. He’s not
related to me at all, but that’s not what I tell the people who sell tickets to
get in. The window says, “Prof. Harper Goff—Banjo Lessons.” But banjo
isn’t what he’ll be remembered for. You see, Harper Goff has a window
at Disneyland because he helped build a kingdom there.
Here’s the question I keep asking myself: What do I want my window
to say? This question is worth thinking about even if you don’t know the