Having a Heart in a Sometimes Heartless World
Day 176 – Week 26 – Messy spirituality
Scripture focus: Our involvement with God’s revelation doesn’t put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else’s sin. But in our time something new has been added…Romans 3:20-21 The Message
“We preachers have often given people the mistaken idea that the new birth and being ‘filled with the Spirit’ are going to automatically take care of emotional hang-ups. But this just isn’t true. A great crisis experience of Jesus Christ, as important and eternally valuable as this is, is not a shortcut to emotional health. It is not a quickie cure for personality problems. It is necessary that we understand this, first of all, so that we can compassionately live with ourselves and allow the Holy Spirit to work with special healing in our own hurts and confusion.
We also need to understand this in order to not judge other people too harshly, but to have patience with their confusing and contradictory behavior. They are people, like you and me, with hurts and scars and wrong programming that interfere with their present behavior. Understanding that salvation does not give instant emotional health offer us an important insight into the doctrine of sanctification. It is impossible to know how “Christian” a person is, merely on the basis of his outward behavior.” Healing for Damaged Emotions, by David Seamands, p.12
I have a friend who gently challenges churches to think about how they approach people – especially hurting ones. He says that sometimes we ask people what they believe, and if we discover that we believe the same stuff – then we can join in spiritual fellowship. You can only belong if you believe like everyone else in the community. My friend thinks this is “not quite right”. In his congregation, he encourages people to come and belong. And then together with all the other messily spiritual people in his community – he invites people to wrestle with what they believe. I love his perspective.
Emotionally healthy people are better equipped to patiently tolerate the confusing and contradictory behaving (and believing) of self and others. They’re the kind of people who can “belong” without requiring everyone else to “believe” the same things that they believe. Emotionally healthy people can tolerate frustration, fatigue, discouragement, and even disagreement – without being judgmental, unkind or disrespectful. I realize that, in theory, it seems like it is easier to get along with people who agree with us. I’m just not quite sure it’s the way Jesus thinks.
I used to think healthy people didn’t feel frustration or get overly tired or ever end up discouraged at the end of a long, hard day. I was wrong. And although I’d prefer to become a person who is unfamiliar with sorrow, I’m probably far better off praying instead to become a person who can respond to suffering, sorrow, dissent, disagreement, discouragement, fatigue, frustration and failure in an emotionally healthy manner.
All I know is that I’m glad it’s impossible to evaluate how “Christian” people are, based on their behavior.
Does this mean our behavior doesn’t matter? Of course not! Behavior is often a clue that alerts us to our deeply felt hurts and scars that interfere with our ability to behave in a manner that is consistent with what we truly believe. Or wish we could believe. May we have an emotionally healthy day – aware of both our behaving and believing – able to see the messiness and inconsistent choices – willing to trust in God to have his way with us in spite of our limitations - joining with the man who once cried to Jesus, “Lord, I believe! Help me in my unbelief!”
Recommended reading: 2 Kings 5 in the morning; Acts 15 and Psalm 141 in the evening
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