1. CRASH
Paul Louis Metzger

3. The Most Desirable Place to Live?
• LA—Crash?
• St. Paul, Minnesota—Nice?
• Portland—Cool?
• The City of God—Love.

4. It has been said…
In the South, they don’t
care how close you get,
but how high you get.
• In the North, they don’t
care how high you get,
but how close you get.
• The South loves the
person, not the race.
• The North loves the race,
not the person.

5. From Crashing to Touching
• Intolerance?
• Indifference?
• Infatuation?
• Intimacy.

6. Tolerance and Love
• “I would rather be loved than tolerated.”
• God does not simply tolerate us. God loves us.
• The Bible does not say, “For God so tolerated
the world that he chose not to give his one and
only Son….”
• The Bible does say, “For God so loved the world
that he gave his one and only Son….” (John 3:16)

8. “The Word became flesh and made his
dwelling among us. We have seen his
glory, the glory of the One and Only,
who came from the Father, full of grace
and truth.” (John 1:14)

9. “If you can learn a simple trick, . . . you’ll get
along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You
never really understand a person until you
consider things from his point of view . . .
until you climb into his skin and walk around
in it.”
—Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird

10. How Then Shall We Believe and
Bear Witness?
• By Crashing into Others?
• Or by Coming Close and Touching Them?

11. “Henri Nouwen defines 'community' as the
place where the person you least want to
live with always lives. Often we surround
ourselves with the people we most want to
live with, thus forming a club or a clique,
not a community. Anyone can form a club;
it takes grace, shared vision, and hard
work to form a community.”
– Philip Yancey

12. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray
also for those who will believe in me
through their message, that all of them
may be one, Father, just as you are in me
and I am in you. May they also be in us so
that the world may believe that you have
sent me. I have given them the glory that
you gave me, that they may be one as we
are one—I in them and you in me—so that
they may be brought to complete unity.
Then the world will know that you sent me
and have loved them even as you have
loved me” (John 17:20-23).

13. The Sense of Touch