Welcoming Hearts

I’ve been intrigued lately that there can be a few ways to answer a question. There is our initial answer that we are quick to come up with. It may be the right answer, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s more to it if we’re willing to reflect for awhile and see what God’s Spirit stirs up in us.

Who did Jesus come for? Where did He spend His time? In Luke 5:30, the Pharisees complained bitterly to Jesus’ disciples and said, “Why do you eat and drink with such scum?” Jesus answered them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor – sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners and need to repent.” (Luke 5:31-32) How telling!

The quick answer is that He came to save the lost, the hurting and broken. Luke describes them as sick, which aptly fits a doctor’s perspective. I wonder if in our neat and tidy boxes, where we fit all our church answers, we think of the need that person has over there. That’s the one Jesus was referring to. Once saved, always saved, and I professed my faith long ago….surely not me. Perhaps the prodigal son in his honest need has countless elder brothers and sisters who can’t imagine how they too could be fallen or lost. We safely guard that we aren’t the hurting or broken. We do all we can to show our together worlds. On the surface, we’d never say we had it all together. Underneath it, though, upon deeper reflection, we realize how much we want it to be so.

Jesus’ rebuke didn’t come to the one who admitted they had need. His rebuke was for the one who didn’t see how He could possibly be talking about them.

1 Timothy 1:15 says, “This is a true saying, and everyone should believe it: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners-- and I was the worst of them all.” A fuller picture of the original meaning of save is to rescue, deliver, make whole, heal. Our salvation is secure when we ask for forgiveness and personally accept the work of Christ on the cross, but there is an ongoing work He does in our life to heal us and make us whole.

How powerful God’s grace and love pour into the life of the one who admits his or her need for Him! Imagine letting the walls fall down, where we can give up the pretense and say to Him, “Apart from You, God, I can do NOTHING. If You don’t heal me, I won’t be whole. If this is up to me, I’m as good as dead. In Your mercy, Lord, come do what only You can that I can’t do alone.”

Can we let Him see our need? Can we admit with Him that we have need? It’s not self-pity, it’s not self-focused. It is healing – letting God work wholeness in our deepest parts. An incredible ministry takes place when we let God enter in to our humanity like that. God reaches us, heals us, and sends us back out to reach more who are willing to let God tear down walls, reveal their need, and let Him touch them.

“How precious is Your unfailing love, O God! All humanity finds shelter in the shadow of Your wings…Pour out Your unfailing love on those who love You, Your saving justice to those with honest hearts.” Psalm 36:7,10 (NLT and NJB). The Message says, “Do Your work in welcoming hearts.”

Jesus welcomes us to come as we are. Leave the pretense behind. Let Him uncover layers and walls we’ve set up to guard or defend ourselves. Feel our need – and see that our Savior has come for you and for me. There is a work of healing and wholeness that He longs to do in the depths of our soul.

There is an epidemic of hurting people who are desperate to know they are not alone. The last words Jesus shared after His resurrection in Mark 16:15-18 were to send the disciples, His people, out into a hurting world to bring healing. “And the Lord worked through them…” (NLT, v.20) Maybe one of the ways that He does that is through our own testimony of healing. The Message writes, “Validating the Message with indisputable evidence.” What an incredible testimony, indisputable evidence, when we share that our lives have been touched and healed. Yours can too.

Enter In

Relationships can be the greatest blessing and they can take a lot of work. People are just that way. They can give us a sense of connectedness or a harsh dose of rejection. Relationships can go in seasons and some can end. For as hard as that might be at times, I think I'm okay with that as long as we didn't leave unfinished business hanging open.

If we take on the picture of community that we find in Scripture, we will be engaged with others and not isolated. We build relationships of trust where we can let people in. Hospitality in its greatest sense is letting people in to the real places in our life. Come by our house on any given day and you'll find real life being lived here. You might find us working hard or taking a day off. The house might be well tidied or well lived in. We might be enjoying each other's company or getting on each other's nerves. Laughing, fighting, striving, playing, happy, mellow, grouchy. Real emotions, real life, actively present.

I want to be in relationships where we can be real. I want the kind of community where we give up pretending to have all the answers. I want to be free to say I'm struggling or I'm hurting, where we come alongside each other in those valleys. I want others to be able to say the same hard, but honest, words to me.

More often, I find that we're too busy or too distracted or too afraid to really engage. We might think something, or wonder about our questions, but we don't have the guts to say it. Instead of sharing our heart or being vulnerable, we withdraw. Anything that feels like getting real, being open, or saying what we feel is too confrontational. We avoid it like a plague because it is too uncomfortable. We glaze over it or set it aside.

I think an amazing thing would happen if we'd engage in authentic relationships with open hearts. We'd all be healthier and working towards being whole. What happens instead is that we tell people to get over it or move on. Maybe not in so many words, but dismissive and devaluing all the same. We try so hard to comfort or to fix that we miss the point of what is on someone's heart in the first place. Or perhaps we just give space until the thing passes because we don't really want to enter in.

We become people who stuff down our hurts or our questions where they fester and wound. Time really doesn't heal all wounds. God can heal through time, but only if we will let Him in. If we don't face our need, our questions, our longing, our frustrations, our wounds and deal with them, they will continue to affect us profoundly. We might not like the results when they decide to rear their ugly head later on.

Imagine if we could keep current in our hearts by dealing with what we are facing today, and not having a pile up of our past. Sounds wonderfully ideal, doesn't it? It doesn't happen when we just insist today is a brand new day. That it is, but what have we got going on beneath the surface? To try to wipe a slate clean by our own effort might be as effective as leaving left-overs to mold in the frig. They won't be forgotten forever -- they will grow ugly, green and fuzzy over time.

God's mercies are new every morning, and today is a new day. But to get current with today's stuff might take some work first. It involves going back and getting rid of the pile -- not hiding it in the closet or saying it isn't there. For many it might begin with asking God where those broken places are in the first place. Maybe we've denied them so long we don't even know how to expose them anymore. We can walk wholeness as we give Christ full access to every aching, frustrating part of our hearts. He wants to bring healing there. He wants us to walk in freedom.

Life-Changing Truth

It is high time for me to get real and live this faith journey the way God wrote it. I've spent too much of my pent-up life doing what I thought was right, but missing it entirely. I was plagued by a disease of pretense. I so desperately wanted life to fit in a box and make sense, and make myself presentable enough to be accepted and loved. Not anymore. I can't do it. If Christ came to make me free, I can't be bound by the strain I put on myself any longer.

I think I've been fed a pack of lies. I digested them, believed them, and acted on them. I wasn't sure if they were quite right, but they were presented in such a confident way that I thought they must have been. I didn't know how incredibly toxic they were until they made my heart sick. My gut wrenched with such a pain that I knew something wasn't right. This isn't the abundant life that Jesus came to bring. This wasn't freedom. Something is seriously wrong.

Galatians 3:1 says, "O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth...?" Somewhere along the line, truth has been distorted. We have believed things that are not Scriptural but they sounded so convincing that we thought they must be. Sometimes there is just the slightest of nuance that makes it appear that two ideas must be saying the same thing. That we shouldn't get hung up on the semantics because it doesn't make much difference anyway. That's where we get hooked. The enemy deceives oh so subtly to draw us in. We don't even see it coming until we are so bound up we don't know what to do.

That gut-wrenching feeling is what told me loud and clear it was time for me to high-tail it into counseling. It is the most thrilling adventure I've embarked on. I'm too excited about it to keep it to myself. I want to live out loud and bring others with me. On the other side of this intense heart surgery is freedom! Healing!

This pursuit of wholeness is a whole lot of work. No longer can I be satisfied with looking the other way, or busying my life so that I don't notice. Scratching the surface won't do. This going deep is a lot of hard looking at what I believed, and going even deeper to find out what is at the core of it. Repairing wounds that haven't been tended. Stitch by stitch, it is a supremely significant time out with my Healer.

There are lines of Sara Groves songs that just cut through the chase and say it straight. She has a way of putting deep and profound things into words and pictures. A few of her songs are just going right to that place where my heart is being healed. To name a few, check out Just Showed Up or Something Changed. Give the lyrics a read if you have a moment. (Better yet, listen to the songs...but I don't know if there is a way to connect the music here.) It puts into words the significance of being changed by something huge. That something huge is God -- it's Truth -- it's the healing that the Healer Himself brings.

I think there are things that we have accepted as truth. They sound right, we've been raised by it, we hear it so much that it has become part of our belief system. The problem is, it won't hold up with Scripture. In fact, if we bother to really turn the idea upside down and ask what it is really saying, we might find out that we were missing the mark of what Jesus came to do. I wonder how many take the time to bring our belief out into the light, look at its angles, and find out if this is what Jesus is really saying. Or is there somewhere along the line that we've bought into a lie? Are we actually a Pharisee thinking we've got it all figured out and that we no longer need to call into question what we have established must certainly be true?

I am in a desperate search of truth. Not what people think is true, not what has been said is true, but a radical revolution of taking it up with Christ Himself. He is the Way, the Truth, the Life. I need to hear it from HIM. I have spent too much of my life getting ripped up by things that were never of Him in the first place. I'm ready to clear them out and be healed.

A Little Laugh

We became an infirmary this week. Seemed they were dropping like flies. Sweet Maddie threw up on me, Emma woke me at the crack of dawn to tell me how much her body ached, and Samuel came home from his retreat with a sore throat and fever. God bless him, Samuel had it the worst. His turned into strep throat, high fever (how does 105.5 grab you?) and a virus of cough and congestion on top of that. I've never been much of a nurse, but I'm one in training for sure. Who needs which medicine, comfort, or tender-loving-care...then go back around again and see what else I can give. It's a pouring out time with a servant's heart and the compassion of a mama seeing her little ones hurt.

We are on the mend, hallelujah! And the best thing was the dose of laughter Maddie just gave me. You'll have to picture the moment I had with a two and a half foot Chinese nurse, still learning how to talk. She had the forehead thermometer that she was pretending to take temperatures with. I think she likes the beeps. She came up to me and said, "Let me feel your head! What do you sink? (translate: think) You're 8:30 and 5 minutes!!" We both laughed hysterically, one of those good belly laughs.

So what do you think? Sounds like I must be healthy. If laughter's the best medicine, I just got a good dose of it!