Pass On the Good News Your Way

A wonderful blessing of face book and other sharing internet places is that we can pass on what truths have been grace for us and their source. And those of us who feel called to share are encouraged when someone “gets” what we share and finds it helpful. A very erudite elderly priest who had founded a college in the Philippines once commented about another priest who wrote an amazing amount of novels with moral themes. He said, “That man has never had a thought he didn’t share with the world!” I don’t think he was saying it as a compliment!! Perhaps this is a difference between the ministry of an introvert and an extrovert!

I worked with the MBTI about how differences in inborn personality types affect our learning/teaching style, our very different ways of expressing love even in marriage, and the way we relate to God and with others spiritually, and how middle managers need to understand the big differences in what rewards motivate different people. I know from experience how different styles of discipline have very different responses from even my own five children.

Understanding how different we are is a huge challenge. Even knowing what I learned decades ago, now in my eighties I’m finally understanding the importance of other ways of being in the world in all aspects of life. I think for our mental, emotional, spiritual growth it takes a lot of time, challenges, and even grace to begin to value all the differences in people enough to recognize we need all of them to work together in different areas and ways and times.

As an extrovert, with all the new outlets, I tend to share everything I am currently learning or finally understanding. The hard part isn’t seeing that many people aren’t in a place in their particular journey to understand and value what I share. I, as an extrovert, struggle when I realize that many times when people actually hear and “get” what I’m saying and even apply it to their own lives, they don’t necessarily share it!

My expectation or hope that they will is admittedly mostly an ego problem. But to me it is also a spiritual problem for our world…..not that my insights are world changing. But so much of mine do come from my spiritual journey and the totally unconditional Love that God has expressed in Jesus. I don’t think I would have them without that grace. And I realize again that people whose strength is responding intellectually and people whose gift is responding emotionally are on a different schedule on their journey. And a whole person response to Jesus takes both. Once more that is a reason for us to value both those who value law and those who respond to Love and find a way to work together since it takes a lifetime to get those two sides of us working equally well.

I hope that makes sense.

In my youth I played by the rules mostly out of fear of rejection or judgment by others. After I was simply overwhelmed by an experience of the love of God, I struggled with the feeling that the law was a prison of sorts that limited curiosity and creativity. So, one day as I was doing breakfast dishes, I prayed, “Lord would you show me how law is loving.”

The next moment I heard a thumping at the door. When I opened it, our dog had dropped a bird there. The bird was flopping around and seemed to have a broken wing. I brought the bird in and wrapped a dish towel around it, to keep the wing straight. I decided to make a sort of incubator to keep it still in a round bowl on the stove near a kettle steaming slightly for warmth. It simply wouldn’t accept the limits, thrashing around and almost throwing itself against the hot kettle. So, I wrapped it with a larger towel carefully and held it, trying to soothe and eventually trying to feed it. It simply thrashed and fought until it died. As I was burying it, it hit me. The law is our incubator until we become spiritually mature enough to love others as we love ourselves and to accept the limits that requires. Let’s face it, that takes time and a lot of grace.

Consequences are built into life and if we cannot accept limits, we end up learning the hard way. We are unfinished people at every age. It takes a lifetime of challenges and grace to learn to love others not only as ourselves, but as God loved us in Jesus.

If we believe intellectually in the God of Jesus or have been awakened by an experience of that Love, we are called to share in both word and deed using whatever gifts God has given us and working together at encouraging and helping others to do the same.

Jesus fleshed out God’s Love for us. Pass it on.

What the Heck is Grace?

Repentance is now considered a negative word. It implies sin, guilt and shame to the modern mind. Yet, the truth of the biblical quote, “All fall short of the glory of God” (which is perfect love) is pretty obvious.

The problem seems to me that somewhere along the way, we decided that seven was old enough to recognize right from wrong and twenty-one was old enough to take responsibility for our choices.  End of story.  The reality that we not only can grow in our understanding of and capability to love ( of morality), but were designed to do this at least to the day we die, got lost in the shuffle between Adam and Eve and their apple of damnation and Jesus Christ and the cross of salvation.

What if we use the word “unfinished” to describe our falling short?  What if we use the word “growth” for the change implied by the word “repentance.”  And then recognize that grace is simply “unconditional love ” in many different guises. And that is the fertilizer, the good soil, that enables growth and change.

Important note:  Love does not protect us from the pain of natural consequences from our imperfect human choices.  But love/grace stays with us through the whole learning process and has the power to free us to change when we recognize our need for it.

What percentage of the world’s population experiences perfect love from birth to seven?  More, probably, than between seven and twenty-one. But where in the world do children experience only that kind of love?  In an imperfect world of disease, hunger, greed, war, and TV is it even possible to protect children from knowledge of the fear, pain, and hunger in the world?

Even in a loving family, in affluent circumstances, traumas can still happen at critical stages of a child’s development.  I knew a family who had several children and when the youngest  was a toddler, the mother stayed with the oldest who had to be in the hospital for a week. After they returned, the youngest would have a panic attack if the mother even went out the front door and could no longer go to sleep except in bed with the parents.  Up until a certain age, a child experiences “out of sight” as “gone forever.”   By school age, the child seemed to outgrow the fears, but years later, in retrospect, the mother recognized that a profound fear of abandonment has been a strong influence even into adulthood.

We probably all experience the crippling effects of forgotten, even innocently caused traumas, unaware of how they influence our responses and choices in adulthood.  The key to freedom is recognizing them, feeling sorrow for how they have wounded us and caused us to misuse others, and then by taking responsibility for seeking healing.  Recognition is the beginning of the process.  Sometimes awareness alone can free us to break a pattern of response.  Other times, it takes time and we can only replace the destructive response with a less harmful one, during the process.

We are terribly vulnerable human beings in a scary and confusing world in a humongous unknown universe.  Both, addictions to pleasures and to behaviors that give us the delusion that we are in control, dull the pain of awareness of our human vulnerability.   I personally am not into housekeeping.  Dust reappears the next day; no feeling of control there.  But sorting and organizing lasts a lot longer and is much more satisfying. But sorry you will be, if you come along and disturb my order.  And when dealing with painful realities in the middle of the night, but too tired to organize anything, I’ve been known to stand at the kitchen counter and eat half of a peach pie.  These are not terribly destructive painkillers, unless I use them to indefinitely avoid looking at what is the  root of my particular pain at that time.

I’ve never known anyone that thought this life is heaven.  Though there have been times I thought it might be hell.  I am definitely no longer a Pollyanna, who saw only the good, because I felt too fragile to deal with the pain of life.  Nor am I my midlife self that became a cynic, who expected and tried to prepare for the worst.  With grace, I’ve become able to see both in each day; to experience the deep sorrow of loss and the joy of beauty all around me at almost anytime.

When we believe we are loved at our worst and still unfinished at our best,  most days we are able to try to be open to how our lives are challenging us to grow. Sometimes, like Peter Pan, my theme song is “I Won’t Grow Up!”  But then I remember that life does not give up challenging us, which means I’m just dragging out the process.

We are all a work in progress.  Awareness is the key to progress. And that comes in different ways: discomfort within,  overloaded responses to people and events, even just something we seem to suddenly read or hear all around us.  We will be able to perceive the cues in different ways through different stages of our own life.   When I got brave enough to make the leap from agnosticism to faith in grace, I could suddenly make sense of the scripture in spite of all its anomalies.  But I met many life long Christians that admitted sadly that they did not really find meaning there.  Then later in life, they suddenly found great joy in it.  I had loved the Scripture from my early thirties, but during my fifties and sixties it simply became like reading the back of cereal boxes.  We all go through stages, but they differ in timing because of our various personalities. So, don’t assume because you have never enjoyed or understood something, that you never will.  Like it or not, we grow and change with both losses and gains during the process.

All of this can be seen as psychological or spiritual or both.  Mostly, it’s just the way life is, but how we perceive it can make a huge difference in becoming the people in process that we were created to be.

 

 

Fighting Wrongs Does Not Require Hating People

There’s a difference between fighting against things we consider wrong and making blanket judgments about people we don’t know. Perhaps the problem is that we all have different ideas about who are Evangelical. To me Evangelicals are the people in and outside of organized religion who have experienced the unconditional love of God and want to share it. Christian Evangelicals are the people who came to know with heart, mind and spirit that there is no condemnation by God through an encounter with a living Jesus. I am one of those. We finally learned that we were forgiven before we even screwed up. ( I don’t happen to think we are the only ones that come to know that, but it was my way.) We know that ALL of us fall short of perfection. That we are not finished…..and don’t have to be perfect….because to be human is to be in process. But to accept the forgiveness we already have, we have to give up our addiction to the illusion of perfection. Then, we can begin forgiving ourselves and start accepting the flow of grace that will help us grow in loving ourselves and others as God loves us. For me an ongoing very real and very personal relationship with Jesus is what has gotten me through the struggles of life so far. I was born small and fearful, so anger has been my pain reliever. I really need that ongoing relationship with love fleshed out.
I admit I did not grow up with much contact with “2nd generation Evangelicals”…..those who inherited religion as laws interpreted by humans, but haven’t experienced the love of God personally. It’s been more of a problem for me to forgive and love the Catholic hierarchy . Most of the Evangelicals I happen to know are people from all denominations, including the Jewish faith, who know the healing, life changing love of God through Jesus personally. And we, like the Prodigal son, are very, very grateful that we are loved and can come home just as we are. Knowing we are imperfect, but loved and that the more we experience that love, the more healed and free we will be to love others is the core of our spirituality. There are “Super Believers” in all religious groups who inherited the form of the religion, but have not experienced that healing love. You can’t give what you don’t know. I am very sad for those people, I remember how it feels, and how angry I was all the time. So I fight on issues, but pray the people I disagree with will come to experience enough love somehow to be healed and to experience life in a whole new way.
At thirty, I was an active agnostic in the sense of rejecting everything I had been taught about God, but investing time in searching for truth. Then someone not connected to a denomination persuaded me to pray, “Jesus, IF you are who you claim to be, I need you to save me from my blindness and open my heart to God. Take my life and help me become the person God wants me to be.” I think that because I had been truly seeking, my response was almost immediate. Within the hour I was overflowing with joy from knowing with my heart, mind and spirit that there was a God, that Jesus fleshed out his Love, and I was loved just as I am, because of who God is, not who I am. It’s not a magic abracadabra formula. And the journey is different for each of us. But for many of us it is a way to consciously begin a grace filled partnership in the journey.