"I can't believe you'd go there"

People ask us why we go to these kinds of events. This is why. It’s these stories. We go to hear people’s beautifully broken, human stories. We want to engage people with their story, listen to them. We do this because we care. And we do this because we too have a story to tell.

Hope happens when you believe in a different story, a different telling of your purpose and place in life. We believe we tell that different story, the story of hope. It’s one that plays out through the dozens of raw, diverse, human stories represented on our website. But we don’t get to tell this story of hope unless we care enough to listen to another’s story first.

One of my all-time favorite stories in the Bible is the one about Matthew. This guy was despised by the religious establishment, hated and judged. He was after all a traitor to his country and his God. He took a job working for an enemy nation to collect taxes for them from his own friends, family, and neighbors who’d been conquered by this enemy nation.

But one day Jesus came to his town and walked right up to where he was collecting taxes and invited Matthew to follow him. He didn’t call him names, judge him, shout out all the terrible things he’d done, or even demand that he confess his wrongs and return all the money he took. No. He just gave him an invitation to follow him. Jesus then shows up for dinner at Matthew’s house and the religious leaders in town have the predictable reaction of judgment.

“Why does he eat with such sinners?” they ask. It was one thing to talk to Matthew, but a whole different thing to go and hang out with the guy at his house.

But Jesus turns the tables on his critics and says, “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? I’m not here for good people, I’m here for sinners.”

Pause just for a second and think about what Jesus just said. The only people who get to see the doctor are those who know they are sick. 

There’s so many times when I go to bed at night wondering why I said whatever I did to my wife, why I yelled at my daughter, why I wasn’t kinder to my neighbor. It’s frustrating that I seem incapable of being the man I want to be. But it’s stories like this that remind me of the hope that Jesus came to give. A hope for messed up people like me.

So why do we show up at unexpected places, places like Warped Tour. It’s simple. Jesus didn’t come for good people. He came for people who knew they weren’t. He came for broken people. And that’s why we go to these places.

We don’t go because we think we are better. We go because we know we are not. We’re not there on some humanitarian mission to help the poor souls at rock concerts. We go because we’re all poor souls in need of help. We go because this is where we keep finding people looking for hope. And we want to have that conversation.

Doug Bender is an I Am Second writer, small groups coach, and author of I Am Second: Real Stories. Changing Lives. and Live Second: 365 Ways to Make Jesus First.