We recently moved and we’ve been trying the local eateries. Today I stopped by a Chinese food place and ordered the Cashew Chicken (side note: it comes with fried rice, which explains the odd look on the server’s face when I ordered some supplemental fried rice). I got my takeout order and walked back to my study to enjoy my meal while, you know, pastorally multi-tasking.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the Cashew Chicken box and couldn’t see any, ummm, chicken. It was there; I just couldn’t see it at first. I had to dig for it amongst an array of ingredients that didn’t seem to need to be there: carrots (ok…yeah and yum), mushrooms (boo…who wants to eat a fungus?), water chestnuts (good for crunch), along with some other ingredient that I could not actually identify. And, of course, there were the cashews…enough of them to meet the minimum daily requirement for nut intake–if there is such a thing–outside Washington D.C., that is.

Overall taste…not too bad. But, man, I had to go looking for the chicken–and I wanted more of it.

Sometimes I think we get like that in our Christian life. We do lots of good things–some of them actually tasty–in our efforts to reach people and serve them. We try really, really, really hard to be Christianly “nice”–and, we sometimes pull that off (unless we’re in a curmudgeon-infested church board meeting). But those good things are not, in my view, explicitly Christian. They’re good and we’re nice but our niceness sometimes even masks the call we have to serve explicitly in the name of Jesus.

I know all about the ways in which we’re told to make our presence felt with genuine hearts of service. And I know that we are called to be relationally invested in people as people–and not people as objects for evangelism or church recruitment. And I get it. We have to actually care for actual people–love them the way Jesus did.

So, we serve, with our outreach and community investments and our willingness to be “present” with people. But, I think sometimes we cover up the chicken with our genuine “niceness.” The Kingdom is about more than being nice (though I wish the lady in the beige sedan had been nice and honored the crosswalk sign–instead of trying to run me down–while looking at me as if I was in her way).

Jesus needs to be front and center. He is the Way and Truth and the Life. He said that what we do, we do in His Name. And it’s highly likely that if we are more purposeful about sharing Him, that people will want more of Him.

So maybe we could just be a little more obvious about using Jesus’ name and sharing His Name while we’re being “nice” to people.

Or maybe we’re just chicken.

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