Have you ever met a Christian?

An excerpt from
The Irresistible Revolution
Shane Claiborne

Whenever folks ask Mother Teresa about her work in Calcutta, how it was going, what life was like, she would say, "Come and see." Finally, we actually were. I was ready to see Christianity lived out. Brooke and I got a bunch of shots and headed to Calcutta together to live an incredible adventure working alongside Mother Teresa and the sisters among the "poorest of the poor." In the morning, we worked in an orphanage called Nabo Jibon, taking care of children with physical and mental handicaps, many of whom had been abandoned in the train stations. In the afternoons, I worked in Khalighat, the Home for the Destitute and Dying, the first home Mother Teresa had started.
Every week, we would take soap and bubbles and meet about a hundred kids at a water hole. We'd set up a station to help bandage wounds, a station to sew clothes that were torn, and an area for washing off the kids and splashing each other. The brothers would cook a meal for everyone. Some of the kids just wanted to be touched with love, and some confessed that they cut themselves or scraped their knees just so they could be seen in the makeshift clinic, to be held and healed.
When we got there, I thought we were crazy, and then I saw that there were dozens of people from all over the world who had come there to join the work, ordinary radicals just trying to figure out how to love better. We quickly settled into a little hostel across the street from the Mother House, where Mother Teresa and the sisters lived. There were volunteers from all over the world, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty. Some had been there for years. They taught me to love, to risk, to dream. There were missional evangelicals, curious atheists, simple pilgrims, and wild revolutionaries.
One of my great inspirations was a man named Andy, who pretty much ran the home for the dying. (He had been there longer than most of the sisters.) Andy was raw and sassy and gentle. I remember him telling one of the young nuns, "Sister, can you visit Mr. Raju, the lovely man in bed number fourteen? He has s~~~ everywhere." The nuns didn't know how to respond; some would frown and some would giggle. I also remember Andy rolling his eyes with a smile and scolding me for pampering one person too long, because there were "so many who need to be loved."
One day, one of the patients I was very close to was on the verge of death. On my way home, I gave him a hug and stuck a protein cookie under his pillow. Busted. Andy saw what I had done, shook his head hopelessly with a big smile, and we left together to go to Mass. Eventually, Andy told me his story. (He didn't talk much about himself.) He used to be a wealthy businessman in Germany, and then he said he read the gospel and it "messed everything up." He read the part where Jesus commands the disciples to sell everything they have and give it to the poor (Luke 12:33), and he actually did it. I had met some fundamentalists before, but only "selective fundamentalists," not folks who took things like that literally. He sold everything he owned and moved to Calcutta, where for over ten years he had spent his life with the poorest of the poor. He told me that in a few years he might want to go back and visit his beloved mom for a bit, and then he would come back to be with the dying and the destitute, and his new family. I had gone in search of Christianity. And I had found it. I had finally met a Christian.