Hurt Feelings

One of the toughest lessons to learn in this life is that your personal feelings are often irrelevant. I really mean that. Of course, there are some situations and relationships in which your hurt feelings are the most relevant aspect involved. But those situations are very close to home and heart, and for most of us, a great deal of our lives are lived beyond our most intimate circles.

And even there, we sometimes get it wrong when we let our personal feelings be the judge. I could totally flip out on my husband and have an emotional fit--and be not only wrong for exhibiting the fit, but wrongly motivated for having it to begin with.

It takes hard work to look past our personal feelings and evaluate a situation from an impartial point of view. I'm talking across the spectrum here, in everything from our relationships with family, with friends, with acquaintances and even that jerk driving too slowly in the car in front of me. When I've made the struggle to look past my FEELINGS, I have often seen that I am completely in the wrong. That, of course, is hardly any fun at all, which is why I think most of us avoid looking too closely, most of the time. (Am I being harsh? Maybe you do this all of the time?)

Anyway, here is where all of my rambling comes into play with God. I can't even count the number of things in the Bible that hurt my feelings. I'm not trying to be flip about this either. I should more accurately say that there are many things in Scripture that deeply offend my sense of justice and my own personal opinions.

Let's start with sin. The Bible tells me that all are sinners. That ALL is comprehensive. It includes that sweet little lady that I sometimes see walking around in my neighborhood, the funny guy who makes everyone laugh at every gathering, the person who reads the news to me on television, the crossing guard who stands in the middle of the road and seems to take her authority to the extreme by flailing and stamping her feet at every car driving past. Every one of them, no matter how kind, charming, famous or quirky, is a sinner who deserves God's condemnation.

That offends me sometimes, even though I know and accept that it is true. I didn't mention myself in the above list, because I have no illusions that I am free from sin. I have gotten to know myself too well over the years and I am not at all deceived about my lack of inherent goodness. But when it comes to other people, it is harder to swallow.

On a smaller scale, suffering and tragedy offend me. I know too many people who have suffered through gut-wrenching circumstances to gloss over this reality of life. You probably do too, when you stop and think about it. Or you could just turn on the news and listen for a few minutes. Your own personal bubble of life might be pretty charming and peaceful, but that is not the case for the majority of people in the world. Painful things, horrible things, really happen.

And that offends me. Where is God? How could He let this happen? Why is He allowing this? How can this be good? If God is so loving, why did he let that child die? If God is just, how can life be so unfair?

But, as usual, my feelings (while normal) are wrong. God is just, He is loving, and He is in control. I don't understand how all of those seemingly inconsistent things fit together, but I accept by faith that they do. And I accept that God sees things differently than I do. And He is the one who is right, and I am the one who is wrong.

Isa 55:9 "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts."

Fortunately, God is bigger than my puny emotional reactions. He has compassion on my confusion and weakness and invites me to struggle through those feelings by interacting with His revealed Word, Scripture. You see, I can't go around struggling with shadows and imaginations. I have to deal with God in truth. And the place to discover who God really is and what God really said is in the Bible ALONE. My feelings and I the things that I think are right don't count. Because, usually, they are flat out wrong.

If you have never studied something in the Bible that has offended you somehow, I can't imagine that you are actually paying attention to what you are reading. The Bible is not some kind of happy-happy-joy-joy fluff story about a swell guy named Jesus who just really liked and loved people an awfully awful lot.

It is the story of a Holy Creator God and the creation that rebelled and hated Him. It is a story of gut-wrenching, sacrificial love on the part of the Creator, and rejection and scorn on the part of the created. And the amazing Redemption of that creation back into fellowship with the Holy One, at the total cost to, and initiative from, God.

It's a hard read, but an amazing one. Because you and me and all of humanity don't get to play the hero's role in this true story. We get to play the villain. And a crazy reversal of justice takes place, as the villain becomes the cherished, adopted son of the hero, despite it all. If it wasn't such a good deal on my behalf-and yours-I would be tempted to be offended. But, as usual, I would be flat out wrong.

P.S. - I really shouldn't go for so long without posting. I tend ramble when I finally get around to writing something. Hope all of the above actually seems cohesive.

A Lion in a Manger

So, at church this morning, I was overawed at the profound implications of a song that the choir sang.

"There's a baby in Bethlehem, a Lion in a manger.
There's a baby in Bethlehem, a Lion in a manger."

I sat in the pew and reflected on the richness of that image. A baby, helpless and scrawny to the eyes of the world, and yet at the same time, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, as described in Revelation.

Revelation 5:5

"But one of the elders said to me, 'Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals."

How often we fail to see things through God's eyes, and are instead distracted by what seems to be true. It is sometimes hard to think of a Christian in a Chinese "reeducation camp" as a victorious saint who is ransacking the house of the evil one. Or of a starving Christian in North Korea as one who has been fed with oil, milk and fatness. We don't always see the elderly man in church as a mighty warrior, wielding weapons of battle: truth, righteousness, peace, and most importantly, a two-edged sword sharper than any surgeon's scalpel.

But so they are.

I was enthralled by the baby in a manger who was really a roaring Lion, ripping the power of the evil one to shreds and claiming His righteous bride.

Then I listened more closely to the lyrics of the song realized that I had it all wrong.

"There's a baby in Bethlehem, a lyin' in a manger.
There's a baby in Bethlehem, a lyin' in a manger."

Hmph.

I liked my version better...

Locks of Love

I had somewhere between 11 and 15 inches of my hair cut off today. It was 15 inches when I measured it last night, but the actual braid of hair that was cut off was only 11 inches long. I am donating it to an organization called Locks of Love. They provide natural looking, custom fitted wigs for financially disadvantaged children who suffer from long term hair loss.

I don't want you to leave me a comment telling me how great I am for doing this.

Instead, I want to tell you a little bit about why I decided to spend over a year growing my hair out in order to make the donation.

I don't usually mention my children on this blog, but I'm going to make an exception today. Because becoming a mother affected me in ways that are too profound to even express in words. I literally became a different person after the birth of my first child.

I don't have time to give you all of the details of that process. But I want to describe a snapshot moment which birthed an incredible thing that had previously been in short supply in my heart: compassion.

One of my children was born prematurely and suffered some complications for the first six months of life. That child is perfectly healthy today, but for the first few years, we kept a very close eye on whether normal development seemed to be taking place.

There were several episodes that gave us cause to panic. One, in particular, is imprinted in my memory. My child began to make strange, twitching-like head motions. It was odd enough, and recurrent enough, that I couldn't ignore it. I did some online research about strange head twitching, and the most common diagnosis was something called Tourette's syndrome. It causes a person to make strange motions or utter strange words in an uncontrollable way.

I had seen some daytime T.V. shows featuring children with Tourette's. To be cruel and blunt, they seemed strange. One of them yelled out cuss words in the middle of perfectly normal sentences. Another would hit himself on the head out of nowhere. Still another made clucking sounds for no apparent reason.

But suddenly, I was faced with the possibility of being the mother of one of those strange-seeming, different-acting children.

My heart was torn open at the thought of watching my precious child navigate through childhood constantly marked out as the one who was different. The one who had something wrong. The strange one. The one nobody wanted to be friends with. The one that everyone laughed at and made fun of.

I cannot even begin to describe the overwhelming sensation of pain and anguish that those thoughts generated. I could hardly swallow. It became hard to breath. I didn't want to think about it, but I couldn't seem to think about anything else.

In that moment, I would have given anything to take the place of my child, and suffer the ridicule and ostracising of being abnormal. But, of course, it doesn't work that way. Mother's can't take the place of their children.

In my case, my child did not end up having the condition that I so dreaded. My child is normal. But I have never forgotten the horror of those days, when the future seemed so uncertain and ominous.

And I can't forget that there are thousands upon thousands of mothers for whom my passing dread is a daily reality. This world is full of children who are born different. The multitude of possible health complications is mind numbing when you think about it. It is a miracle that even one child is born without health problems.

Growing out my hair in order to give some anonymous little girl somewhere a pretty wig is so minuscule an act that it should hardly register on the radar screen of kindness. I don't feel like I did anything spectacular. But I hope that somewhere, there is a mother whose child doesn't have to feel quite so different.

And in a bigger way, I hope that my own children will grow up feeling the compassion that I seemed to miss out on in my own development. I was not the nicest girl in the world when I was younger. I used people. I discarded friends if they didn't have anything to offer me anymore. A lot of that was plain old immaturity. But still, I think a big part of it was the fact that I lacked compassion for other people, and their pain.

I have no doubt that God intended the trauma of my experience to do exactly what it did. Because compassion is something that I have seen over and over again as I have read through the gospels. There are many references to Jesus feeling compassion for individuals, and even for whole groups of people.

Luke 7:13

"When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep.""

Mark 6:34

"And Jesus, when He came out, saw a great multitude and was moved with compassion for them, because they were like sheep not having a shepherd. So He began to teach them many things."

In Psalm 145, God is described as "gracious and full of compassion." There are plenty of other verses that ascribe compassion as one of the attributes of God.

And in the process of sanctification, God molds us more and more into His own image. For me, the most effective means of sanctification have been hard blows from a painful hammer. But the end result is beautiful. I wouldn't trade the ability to feel compassion for any kind of smooth and worry-free life. I would much rather see the world through lenses that help me to see things just a little bit more like the way God sees them.

And when God sees his children, He is moved with compassion for us. If my child had never suffered temporary complications, I wouldn't be able to understand that at all.

I can't say that I have a heart that is perfectly able to feel true compassion all the time. But I'm a lot better at it than I used to be.