Sitting on a porch by a lake in New York last week, my brother-in-law offered me a section from The New York Times.  I declined and kept watching the boats go by, listening to the water lap the rocky shoreline.  He joked, “You don’t want to know what’s happening in the rest of the world?”  Nope.

Not that day anyway.  During my time away I didn’t spend time online or listening to the radio or reading papers or watching any TV except baseball.  It wasn’t hard.  It was satisfying, restful and rejuvenating.

Coming back to the world of 24-hour noise after a tech Sabbath can be disorienting.  Some news stories and have come and gone.  Others are into level three of their coverage and I have to go back and piece together how we got there.  Others, like the coverage of the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa and the Americans being treated at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, are simply puzzling.

I heard a snippet on NPR one morning this week during media re-entry.  Ebola in Africa, Americans transported.  I thought, I hope they’re OK.  By the time I got around to listening to a lengthier report or reading anything about this online, Ann Coulter and others had already chimed in and yet others had retorted.  Having been out of the media cycle and as relaxed as I’ve been in a year, it was hard to imagine what sort of left-right divide could have happened around this issue.

Silly me.  In the world some folks live in, everything is a left-right issue, if they want it to be.

I’m not going to thoroughly research this “debate” or try to catch up on each twist the “conversation” has taken.  I’m not even going to dwell on the hatefulness evident in Coulter’s article, though it will reach out and slap you in the face if you read it. (You can find her 8/6/14 article “Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to ‘Idiotic’” on her website but I don’t even want to offer the hyperlink here.)  I’m simply going to point out one thing, in response to two questions she poses.

Talking about Americans who would be protected from this virus if we stayed put instead of traveling to Africa, she asks, “But why do we have to deal with this at all?”

(We deal with things – unpleasant, seemingly remote things – because we are all living on the same planet and because the far away people suffering a plague are our brothers and sisters.  We deal with it because to care for other humans – especially when we don’t “have to” by law or familial obligation – makes us more deeply human.)

Later she laments people going to Africa on mission trips and asks, “Can’t anyone serve Christ in America anymore?”

(Of course we can, and do.  But this question suggests we either serve Christ here or in other world locations.  It’s a false choice.)

Both questions reveal a lack of understanding about how and why Christians express their faith as action in the world.

Christians deal with the things we would not choose for ourselves and we go to unusual places far from home (literally, emotionally, spiritually) because we are called.  Pushed, nudged, prodded, dogged, and wooed by God.  Beckoned to a task or a place beyond what we would have chosen for ourselves, sometimes an illogical one by other standards.

We worship and follow the One who came in the vulnerable form of a human body, a body just like ours and just like our brothers’ and sisters’ bodies in Africa, susceptible to disease and hunger.  Jesus put his hands all over the scabbed contagious bodies of his neighbors and he sends us to offer healing, too (Matthew 8: 1-3, Matthew 9: 18-38, Acts 3: 1-10).  When we go, we are called to look for Christ in the “distressing disguise of the poor” he wears so often (Mother Teresa).

Medical missionary work in Africa is not how God calls everyone.  It’s OK if it’s not your calling or Coulter’s.  Don’t worry, there is plenty to do here in the States and right there on your street.  But don’t make her mistake.  Don’t assume that hiding out behind vitriol, fear, and an insulating we-take-care-of-our-own mentality will save you.  It might protect you from a virus, at least for a while, but none of that will protect you when God comes calling with another idea.

Though I don’t want to isolate myself in a protective bubble, I enjoyed the bubble of time I preserved for vacation and time out from this fray.  I appreciated the smaller circle of care and concern and I reveled in saying “no” to the newspaper.  I felt called to step back and out of the normal loop of work and responsibility, called into God-given Sabbath time (which is another way God operates that doesn’t make sense to the way the world operates).

The point is not whether you step forward or step back, whether God calls you to this or that at any given moment.  The point is that God is calling.  Always.  And each time we are called out of loops of our own making, into deeper relationship – with ourselves, one another, and God.  Are you listening?