Hitting the Other Extreme

Over the past fourteen years, I've talked with all kinds of people at various extremes. Some folks on one extreme are basically the "forget you, I'm doing whatever I want to with my life" types. Their faith doesn't much come into play when it comes to what they consider their "rights."

Those are the folks who need the passage from Romans 14 that I pulled from yesterday.

But there are other people at the other end of the extreme. They have little to no self-concept and get run over all the time. They enable others to continue to live in unhealthy/sinful patterns by not confronting wrong-doing. They say yes to everyone all the time to make everyone happy...often at great cost to themselves and others around them who love them.

Those people need to hear a different word: love your neighbor as yourself presupposes some healthy degree of self-love. That means healthy boundaries.

A healthy self love is rooted in a genuine humility that understands that we are worthy of being loved because God has created us and bought us back for himself at great cost to himself. That self must be redeemed, healed, cleansed, and transformed, but it is love-able.

The description of the people at either extremes are, of course, caricatures. But my guess is that most of us can, perhaps with a little help from our friends, identify ourselves as leaning towards one end or the other.

Several weeks ago I was talking about the burn-out of my students with an older, wiser man in the ministry. He commented that burn-out is the result of people not truly realizing that they were loved by God.

I responded by telling him that the unfortunate thing about living here in the South is that people already think that they know that...even though most of us remain as ignorant as the rest of the country about this fundamental, critical reality.

My hope is that people on both ends of the extreme might live in the awesome reality of the deep, deep love of God, and have it impact in real life the real people that we interact with on a daily basis. It always results in love, it just looks a little differently, depending on what end of the extreme you happen to find yourself.