I am someone who often straddles several communities.

Sometimes I stand between sexual minorities and heterosexuals. Sometimes I am between the “churched”—traditional people of faith—and the ordinary people out there who have no relationship to faith or to church communities. There is some overlap, and many varieties in between.

But years ago someone said “Those who sit in the middle of the road get sideswiped from both sides.” Is that me? I feel like the traffic of life is zooming by on both sides, among people who are similar to me but unknown to one another. I am brushed, tweaked, winged by strangers.

Recently I had a near miss in traffic, when another driver came roaring up out of an underground garage. As I swerved to avoid him, he stopped, but I was sure he had dented or scraped my car’s side. We both stopped our vehicles right away; I got out to check for damage. He hollered “no contact!” and was in a rush to drive off. Fortunately he was right.

Cars should not be sideswiped. But maybe people should! It is as if these different communities I mention live in close proximity with one another, but remain strangers, like skew lines whose planes never intersect. No contact. Except that I am sometimes in the middle.

A visitor comes to a church and walks in the door, looking for something. Not certain what she or he has stepped into. The majority of people who “go to church” regularly are not strangers to each other. But to the outsider, those insiders seem like a clique, a tight-knit group. A clique is defined as a “exclusive circle of people with a common purpose.”

But the insiders are not exclusive—really, they’re not. It’s just that the outsider who comes in doesn’t know that, and it may not be obvious that insiders mean to be open, to communicate some of the things that are important to them and to offer the promise of so much more, for God’s sake, to newcomers.

The members of a church don’t know anything, yet, about a visitor, either. He or she may seem stand-offish, private, unwilling to give his last name, fill out a visitor card, get involved even by shaking a few hands or staying a few minutes to chat over a cup of coffee.

Why do people remain strangers to one another? As an “insider” I sort of blame “us” most of all. We may not know who comes knocking, entering, checking out our spiritual community. We may not know what strangers and newcomers are looking for. So of course we don’t know, right off, whether we are what they’re looking for.

But the truth is, people who come looking are not looking for us, exactly, but for a sense of the Divine, an experience of awe, a movement of the spirit. We might not be the answer to their questions, but the Spirit has given us opportunity—opened a window through us—by which the stranger may experience both God and the warmth of Divine Love expressed.

The two groups of humanity are, as it were, “sideswiped” in an experience that is not quite a collision or an intersection. If only those who have unconditional love to offer would let the Spirit speak through them to those who don’t yet understand unconditional love. And if only those who are searching, thirsting, hungering for something deeper in the company of kindred spirits, would trust us enough to be touched (sideswiped?) by the encounter.

Trust is a dear commodity these days. It’s hard to turn it on, like a faucet, for total strangers we encounter. We seem to prefer “no contact!” even when the people whose lives we brush by or sideswipe might be the very people whom God means to bring together. And, it just might be God who is sideswiping us through these wonderful encounters with people we don’t know yet.

“Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” — Hebrews 13:2