Mercy-Moment Flare-Ups

So I don't really have any mercy gifts. None. Some people love stuff like spring break Habitat projects. Nothing exhausts me more. I'd rather do door-to-door contact evangelism in downtown Baghdad than do a service project over spring break.

I'm so negatively mercy-gifted that people who have mercy gifts who are close to me end up losing their mercy gifts. I'm like a mercy-gifts black hole. I suck them away from people.

But I was in a leadership class several years ago when a professor pointed out that Jesus was a mercy-gifted leader. So I've been in mercy-gifted rehab for the past couple of years, trying to cultivate mercy a little more intentionally.

This might explain what happened to me yesterday at church.

During the course of a sermon from Ephesians 5 on the importance of obedience in the area of sexual immorality, our pastor cited the issue of child sex trafficking as evidence of how broken our world is sexually.

He told the story of the people who started the charity Love146, a charity that works to free girls from the sex trade industry.

Something about the thought of children being sold as sex slaves disturbed me more than anything has disturbed me in a long time. This isn't the first time I've heard someone talk about children being used and abused in this way, but for some reason it really hit home, made me angry.

And as I was sitting there, Sunday morning, in church, surrounded by fairly comfortable people, singing songs and mixing with friends, this really loud internal voice screamed, "what am I doing here?? How can I just sit here comfortably when this kind of thing is happening? When little girls not much older than mine are waking up this morning to a life of misery and exploitation?!?"

I went home, still deeply troubled. As I processed and prayed, I think I came to some clarity:

1. The Lord is sovereign over heaven and earth, and he is not silent and has not abandoned any of his creatures, even those girls. And he is the one who makes all things new, all things right. This is my hope.

Even if I sold everything I had, took me and my family to Thailand and we set up shop rescuing girls from prostitution, the Lord is their hope and my hope.

2. Therefore, worshipping on Sunday morning, taking communion, commemorating that hope and speaking it to the people around me and offering my life to my God is not something I do recreationally. It is vital.

Worship is the end of it all. If I were to move my family over to Thailand and we were to rescue girls, what would be my hope for them? Clearly, that they would know the love of Christ and find healing and freedom to forgive and power to move forward with their lives.

If that's the end I hope for those girls, it is the end that I myself must embody, not neglect. I must not forget that worship is what matters. Freedom and activism is a means to the end of the worship of Jesus, not the end in and of itself.

Worship is not a waste of time. It is part and parcel of healthy and holy activism.

3. Sometimes in the passion of being angry about something far off, you can forget to love those whom God has given you to love in your immediate circle. This is the classic trap for those who are actually activists: they burn themselves out for orphans far off while neglecting their own children who are near.

So I must love my three kids with a reckless, fiery, patient, wise love. This is the place, these are the little people, whom God has given me stewardship of. I must not neglect the love of them for the sake of those who are far off and therefore, in a sense, actually easier to love hypothetically than the cost of loving these little people in real-time, with real cost associated with it.

4. Finally my prayer became a prayer that I read somewhere: I lament that I have only one life to lose for the sake of the gospel. For right now, he has called me to lose that life for his sake on the college campus.

I love it. But there are so many other things that I would love to also lose my life for as well.

I think I need to find a way to express this desire to see girls freed and cared for. Maybe Kelly and I need to find a way to give more money away and work Love146 into our budget. Maybe there's other ways we can work this out.

For now, I have more work to do on the college campus. And I've got to find a way for these pesky mercy-moments to not flare up quite so violently

About Boundaries

Last week I was meeting with a student who confessed that she was burnt-out from trying to serve everyone around her. She has strong mercy gifts and is studying to go into medicine, so she volunteers a lot at the children's hospital on top of being a slight study-a-holic.

I have mentioned in previous posts that when it comes to spiritual gifts, mercy is not one of mine. Few things exhaust me more than working some sort of spring break or weekend trip to do Habitat, serve a meal to the homeless or tutor a bunch of kids. Give me door-to-door evangelism in the 'hood (or, what's probably more risky, my own neighborhood) over serving people any day. This does not, of course, excuse me from doing those things, it just means that I'm not going to be super-energized when I do them. Jesus' spiritual gifts test probably would have scored very high in mercy...

So what the Lord does is He gives me great students like the woman I met with last week. She, by her very life, reminds me that the Lord has a special place in his heart for the poor and hurting. And I, being not overly-inclined that way, have perspective to help keep her healthy. And so this is what I told my slightly burnt-out, mercy over-achiever:

Jesus left people.

In Mark 1, at the very outset of Jesus' ministry, he heals a bunch of people. The next morning he goes out to a solitary place and prays. The freshly-recruited disciples form a search party, perhaps a bit concerned that their meal-ticket has disappeared. When they find him, they say to Jesus, "Everyone is looking for you." Jesus response? "Let us go somewhere else."

Jesus did not heal every sick person. He did not feed every hungry person. He had boundaries. He said no.

Christmas time is a time for giving, and there's lots of folks lobbying and tugging at us to give to those in need. And we need to do so, Christians first and foremost.

But for those whose hearts are heavy with the cares and needs of the world, take heart: Jesus left people. You do not have to fix everything. You cannot. There is a Messiah, you are not Him. All of us (mercy gifted or not) who follow Jesus Christ have work to do, good works that he has prepared in advance for us to do. We are to do those works, in step with the Holy Spirit. No more, no less. To do more serving than the Lord would have for you to do is (are you ready for this?) a sin. Ultimately you are deciding that it is up to you to be God, both in your own life and in the lives of the people that you are trying to serve.

And so sometimes that means that you leave good things undone. Thank goodness! We are allowed to be freed from the tyranny of the infinite number of needs in our world to serve first and foremost a loving and gracious God.