Misunderstood, Rejected, Wounded
I pick at the mashed potatoes in front of me as I look across the table to the person with whom I’m sharing the evening. He is speaking. I listen.
A lonely heart, a confused hurting spirit is the sound I’m hearing. Yet another soul who has been caught in the entrails of religion and has been left for dead by the Pharisees. Given up as a lost cause, considered to be an expired Christian by many. I see tears in his eyes and I feel them in mine.
Misunderstood, rejected, wounded. His confusion mistaken for rebellion. I look around to see the faces of the restaurant patrons. Our waitress. I seldom see people like I see them tonight. Behind each mask I see eternity. Eternity. It’s hanging there waiting just as sure as my potatoes are waiting to be consumed. I take a bite.
Now we’re outside, standing in the parking lot still talking. I look towards the road to see hundreds of vehicles passing by, each vehicle containing another face, another soul. I look back to the one standing before me with tears running down his cheeks, the love of God reaching in and filling his heart as he tells me what God has been doing for him.
Who am I? I remember being told this past weekend that I think I know everything. I view the stark contrast between the one experiencing God’s healing and those thousands driving by who may have never even heard of the Love of God. I think of my life, fraught with struggles and failures. I realize that I know nothing. I have no answers.
It is hopeless. If we can’t stop shooting and destroying the ones we have in the church how can we ever reach out to the millions outside the church. Our guns are trained on each other and firing rapidly as unbelievers pass by and in and out and are never noticed.
We become so busy getting our theology correct and making others accept it, the sinners go both unnoticed and unloved. We are so busy becoming like God that we have no time for accomplishing His will for our existence.
We shoot . . . and we seldom miss. The church is dying, being slowly massacred by its own people. It is a house divided against itself. Something must change.
WE must change.
We must learn to love God, not religion. We must put others ahead of ourselves. We must allow ourselves to be nothing and God to be everything.
We have to get over this silly notion that God needs us. He doesn’t. Jesus didn’t come for us, He came for others. In fact Jesus said that He and all of heaven are happier when one lost person is brought into the kingdom than they are about all of us who are already there! Luke 15:7
Jesus also said, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.” Matt 22:37-40
If we do this, we can change. We WILL change!
Do you think we can change? How have you changed this in your life?
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originally written and posted on Eli Beachy’s personal blog in September 2005
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5 Responses to “Misunderstood, Rejected, Wounded”
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This is a great post, and a message all Christians should think about way more than they do.
I think change can only come when we are willing to get down and get dirty for the sake of Christ. That means associating with and reaching out to bums, drunks, hookers, drug addicts, murderers and even the religious zealots we used to cater to.
If our witness is so weak that we can’t help even the most fallen people without sullying our own faith, then our faith isn’t worth salvaging anyway.
I really enjoyed reading this.
-Peg Erb
… I apologize. Typical me- I got carried away with leading up to my point and did not complete the thought.
What I meant to bring out was, that in being too afraid to dirty our hands with “sinners”, our focus has turned inward to fellow Christians and their oh-so-glaring issues. For real change, maybe we maybe we should get off our high horse, reach out to the real needy. Then, our young people could finally see the kind of Christianity they can relate to and join in. Once the pressure is off of them, they may be able to see clearly- or for a blessed minute- breathe.
Until then, people will continue to leave Christianity because we find it easier to embitter our neighbor than to feed a hobo. We want our hands clean of the “sinner’s filth”, instead we come away with blood on them.
Right on, Peg, spoken very well.
So glad that you’re finally back with us, using that gift of motivational writing.
I don’t know if “we” can change. But I know that “I” can, because I have and I am. Within two months time, I watched about 25 of my students, 6 co-teachers, and numerous other friends become completely and instantly transformed when Jesus entered their hearts and made them new creatures. Around here, our theology is still sketchy and we need a lot of practical growth. But we sure love Jesus and what He does to the people He inhabits! We’ve experienced some amazing “church life” in cramped rooms and around a simple bed, now known as “the altar”.
YAY for the power and the simplicity of the Gospel. It has been made new to me, and I now know that I know that it is the key to all things.
Hey Linda, its good to hear from you again. Its been quite a few years since we had those email discussions.
Really, what you said there is the key. Its not ‘we’, it is ‘I’. If we all take responsibility for our own change, then it will be become a ‘we’ have changed.