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Gerald Sittser has taught theology at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, for 20 years. Before that he was a pastor in southern California and a college chaplain at Orange City, Iowa. After losing his wife in an auto accident, Jerry has raised his three children alone. He likes coaching his kids in sports and enjoying music with them, hiking and backpacking, woodworking, and beekeeping (he and daughter Catherine have a small honey business).

A recently divorced single parent landed a job in a larger city and bought a house in its suburbs. Over the next year as Ethel tried, with her three children, to find a new church home, she endured the agony of being an outsider:

• Hunting for a parking place and a nursery,
  
• Being ignored in churches where members didn't know each other well enough to realize she was a visitor
  
• Being seated in the sanctuary while she was sized up by the regulars
  
• Attempting to follow new ways of worshiping
  
• Meeting people after the service who asked where her husband was and inquired about the reasons for her move
  

Most of us forget names once we hear them and overlook people once we meet them. We pay attention to the people we already know, or to the ones we want to know. The popular, witty, and successful attract the biggest following, even at church. Like the lepers of Jesus' day, the quiet, elderly, odd, ordinary, and undesirable are often left alone.

Adapted from Love One Another (InterVarsity, 1994, 2008) by permission.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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