Teaching math from a front porch: Making house calls for Christ

A middle school student in South Dakota was doing her
lessons at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. She was struggling with a
math problem, so she emailed her teacher to ask if he could help.

“You bet,” he said. Besides teaching sixth-grade
math at her school, he also happened to live directly across the street.

Next thing she knew, he was standing on her front porch with a marker and a large whiteboard. The two stayed a safe distance apart and worked on her equations together. “I thought it was pretty awesome to see my teacher making a house call to give me a private lesson,” she said later.

This math teacher in South Dakota is not the only teacher
who makes house calls.

Making house calls for Christ

Matthew 9 tells us that Jesus “saw a man called Matthew
sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and
followed him” (v. 9). Note what came next: “As Jesus reclined at
table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were
reclining with Jesus and his disciples” (v. 10).

How did Matthew’s fellow “tax collectors and
sinners” know to join them at his home? He didn’t post the event on
Facebook or send a tweet. It seems to me that he simply invited them to his
home so they could experience what he had experienced. He wanted to give what
he had received.

The woman who encountered Jesus at the Samaritan well did
the same: “The woman left her jar and went away into town and said to the
people, ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the
Christ?’” (John 4:29). As a result, they invited him to “stay with
them” and he did (v. 40), and “many more believed because of his
word” (v. 41).

Taking Christ home with us is his intention for us. For
example, after Jesus healed a demoniac in the country of the Gerasenes, he said
to him, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done
for you, and how he has had…