Day 20: A Limited Perspective
/If you’ll pardon me, I have some extra thoughts from the last couple days that I’d like to flush out. You can read Saturday here and Sunday here if you haven’t yet; maybe that’ll help the following jibberish make some sense.
A brief recap: If we were to treat our faith in God as the ground we walk on, how much more confident would we be in our right now?
To further that, and to challenge that, I’m thinking that we need to remember that our right now is an extremely limited perspective. Our right now holds a great amount of privilege. Most of you reading are in a western, first-world country. My stats tell me that almost 100% of you are reading this on a mobile device, a mini computer that makes our old second-hand iMac G3 look like an actual relic. We do these things and we live this life under very cushy circumstances, and still, we worry and complain and gripe and hustle.
Now, your heartaches matter to God. They matter to me! I’ve been receiving emails from you and we’ve chatted and I love that, because your heart matters to God and so it matters to me. I have my own heartaches. Sometimes I spill them in a fit of emotion as I did with my family last Thursday. Sometimes I hold them tight. Sometimes I give them right to God. Sometimes I don’t even realize they’re there until I have to revisit a trauma. But they’re there and they matter.
But since my trauma and heartache matters to God and your trauma and heartache matter to God, we have to remember: so does everyone else’s.
My words on Saturday were: The families living in mud huts in Ethiopia matter. The cab driver in Dubai matters. The trafficked 13-year-old in Los Angeles matters. The persecuted Jesus-follower in Iran matters. And not only do they all matter, but He has them all in the palm of His hand.
At this very moment, there are people—humans; living, breathing souls—being violently persecuted and harrassed. For their faith, their gender, the color of their skin, their politics, their sexual orientation, their economic status. Actually persecuted. Not called out on social media. Not being followed by TMZ. Sometimes I picture it like a zoom camera in my mind. While I’m sitting here under the blanket my church family gave me before leaving NC, others are the very opposite of cozy. And it is by shear luck that this is the case.
We stand on sure ground. Our neighbors—here and abroad—can’t always feel that sure ground. Their ground is a bit shakier than ours. God does not need me to spread the hope and love of Jesus, but he has chosen me. He has asked that of me. He has commanded that of me. He has commanded that I use my solid ground—my sure hope, my privilege, my luck—to help those on less stable ground. He has called me to pull them up. He has called me to infuse hope. He has called me to use my position to uplift, to exhort, to love others as He has loved me, to see others in His image as He sees me.
There’s no caveat to that. There’s no condition to that commandment. There’s love me (God) and love your neighbor. Leave the core of their heart up to him and just lift them up. Leave the core of their heart up to him and just share your sure ground. Leave the core of their heart up to him, realize that we have a limited, western, uni-cultural perspective in a world that is anything but. Western Christianity is not the ticket to Jesus. Jesus is the ticket to Jesus.
Let’s share that.
Let’s live that. Let’s really, truly, completely live that.
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