August 6, 2026 – Daily Devotional
S.E. Hinton was sixteen years old when she started writing about a war between two Oklahoma tribes nobody outside our state fully understood — not Native nations, but Greasers and Socs. Two sides of the same city who’d decided long before she wrote a word that some people belonged and some people didn’t. She was a kid from Tulsa telling the truth about being on the outside of something, and it turns out that story never really goes out of print. It just changes costumes — a novel, a movie, and now a Broadway musical about staying gold, bringing Tulsa’s story to light a long way from where the real thing happened.
There’s a scene near the start where Ponyboy gets jumped simply for walking home alone on the wrong side of an invisible line. Nobody asked who he was. They only needed to know which side he was standing on. That’s the entire engine of the story — an economy of insiders and outsiders, decided before anyone opens their mouth, based on nothing except which part of town claimed you first.
I don’t think that economy ever left Tulsa. I don’t think it ever left anywhere. Every room has a version of it — who’s in, who’s out, who gets the benefit of the doubt walking home and who doesn’t. We all tend to look differently at people different than ourselves.
Which is why I keep coming back to what God told Samuel, in a moment when Samuel was busy doing exactly what the Socs and Greasers both did — sizing people up by what he could see. Samuel had lined up Jesse’s sons, sure the tallest, strongest looking one had to be God’s pick for king. God stopped him cold: “Do not look on his appearance or the height of his stature… for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7, RSV) The king God wanted was the youngest one, out in the field with the sheep — the kid nobody thought to line up in the first place. The outsider. The one left off the list.
That’s not a small detail. That’s the whole method. God keeps choosing from the ones we weren’t looking at.
Ponyboy’s brother tells him to stay gold — to hold on to something honest and unspoiled in a world determined to sort him into a side and leave him there. I’d add only this: you were never actually on the outside of the story God’s writing. You just might have been standing in the wrong line, waiting to be picked by people who were never the ones doing the choosing.
The Lord already looked. He already saw the heart. There are no outsiders in that line.
-Chris Lambert, Director, Meals On Wheels Oklahoma City
