Those
of you who are reading this (hopefully) know that I’m not the finger pointing type. I am an
aspiring writer, coffee mug lover and self-admitted book addict, among many
other things, but I don’t like to point my fingers and say “Neiner, neiner, you’re
messed up.” It’s really not my style. My style is more to honestly proclaim my
own faults to the internet and hope people can see themselves in my mistakes.
People don’t respond well to confrontation, and if you’ve read my blog at all,
you know I have no right to sling mud at anyone else, anyways, because I’m a
mess. I’m just a mess that happens to love God and I write a lot.
So
this is how this works: I lay out stuff here on the internet that I’m dealing
with, and if it applies to you, take it to heart. And if it doesn’t apply to
you and you say, “Wow, Alisha is messed up,” well, hey, I just said that three
sentences ago, and you’re unoriginal.
The
reason I’m pussy-footing around right now (LOVE that expression) is because I
want to talk about something that’s going to maybe make you uncomfortable. I
say this because I’ve been considering it for the past three or four days, and
it has dang sure made me
uncomfortable. I’ve even cried a couple of times; so much for my stoic image I
have to preserve.
I want
to talk to you about love. Specifically, God’s love. Even more specifically,
the shortage of God’s love that I demonstrate to others.
I’ve
been doing some trolling around the internet lately, looking at different blogs
and taking notes, reading content and envying their readership. Yes, I’m a
missionary, and that’s a pretty sweet gig, but it’s not all I am. In case you
can’t tell from the volume of introspective posts on this website, I’m a
writer. I’ve always written; it’s a compulsion for me. It’s my thought process.
So, while looking around, seeing what’s on the web, I stumbled upon a blogging movement
that’s leaving me staggered.
There’s
a growing movement on the internet of young people, ‘survivors of the
evangelical church’ who have suffered spiritual abuse coming down from the
pulpit. They are talking about their experiences at the hands of people who
have twisted to gospel to suit their own purposes, some coming from
fundamentalist cults, others from harsh, legalistic interpretations of the
scriptures. Some of them, praise God, have been able to move past their
experiences and are forming their own churches. Others are bitter and hateful
towards the message of the gospel, calling it a ‘message of hate and intolerance.’
And while I’ve been reading the blogs of these people, I cannot help but notice
the theme behind these rejected people who have been hurt and who are banding
together in their rejection:
It all
comes from a lack of love.
This
was enough to get me thinking, and caused me to dig even deeper into the
blogosphere. I read the blogs of people whose theology I disagreed with,
hearing the pain behind their convictions. I read the stories of people who had
been turned away from churches simply because they were different, or dirty. I
wept when I found the blog of a gay man who was told God didn’t love him
because of his sexual orientation.
The
bible says, “They will know you are Christians by your love.” Jesus spent his
time with prostitutes, tax collectors, and children, among many others. In a
time where touching the sick was considered contaminating yourself, he embraced
them. To a blind man who was reviled from birth because of the ‘sins’ he must
have committed, Jesus simply slapped some mud on his face and changed his life.
He loved the people who weren’t important, people who didn’t really matter. He
even loved people who were reviled-what self-respecting Jew spends time with prostitutes?
And when his own disciples asked him “why?” Jesus answered,
“It is
not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”
Finally
understanding the full implications of that sentence floored me, and caused me
to go into a massive jag of privately going through my life as I tried to
figure out exactly how much love had been missing from my life. I remembered
situations where I lashed out, people I was unkind to-so many people-and all of
the times I pushed people away instead of listening to them in the way I knew I
should have. I was traumatized by the realization that it had been all about me
for so long, I was barely able to love those I was around.
I
think what really killed me was that, if
I were the only sliver of Jesus someone would ever see in their entire life,
they would never see him in me.
There
are people out there who are starving for love that we refuse to even touch. I’m
not talking about beggars in India or the children of the favelas who live in
Brazil. If you were to go work with them, people would maybe wrinkle their
noses or ask why you couldn’t just send them money, but they would get it.
After all, God calls people to them, people like me. So that’s okay.
But
what about the teenage girl who is so starved for affection that they routinely
sleep with guys just for some morsel of love? What about the homeless, people
who’ve lost everything? What about gay people, who many times have been abused,
cut off from their families and rejected by those who once told them they loved
them? Where are we as the body of Christ for those people? Where am I? This is the question I ask myself, because I have known
all of those kinds of people. I have known people so wounded by life that they
were coming apart at the seams, and to my eternal shame I have done nothing for
them. Maybe I patted them on the back and gave them a couple platitudes, but
love? The kind of love that inspires an innocent man to die for guilty people? That
kind of love never even entered into the picture.
My
heart is just so broken at the idea that I have twisted the knife in the back
of the already wounded. It makes me feel sick, how callously I have behaved
towards the hurts of others. And I want to tell you that I have a plan to make
this better, but I really don’t. One of the things I’ve learned in the last
year is that quick fixes don’t really last. Hurting kids don’t get their hearts
healed in 6 months; sometimes 6 years barely makes a dent. All I have to share
is this realization of how very little I’ve ever done to show my love for
others, of how often I’ve been part of the problem instead of the solution, and
the firm resolution not to continue to live like that.
Because
if you can’t see Jesus in me, what’s the point?
If I
speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but
the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his
mysteries and making everything as plain as day, and if I have the faith that
says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t have love, I’m nothing.
If I give up everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned
as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say,
what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. 1 Cor. 13:1-7
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