Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Too Many in My Stable

“…because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7, NASB).

Each time she comes for her appointment, I sigh.
She is a sweet bipolar woman who has a hard life.  She overdoes everything with no brakes on her verbal outpourings, constantly annoying those who seek to help her. Her illness is doing okay, but her life is heavy on her shoulders.
She really has no one to love her.
I asked her if she had a church home.
She said, “No.” And then, after a pause she said, “Do you want to know what I really believe? I believe in reincarnation.”
After she tried to explain her thoughts, I said, “You know the Bible is really true. God really loves you.”
Then she explained, “My parents go to church; they are as mean as snakes. My sister reads the Bible every day. She won’t even let me see my nieces and nephews.”
I tried to tell her, “People can be mean. God is not. He loves you. The Bible is true; I’m not mean and I care about you.”
“I know, Doc, I know.”


Certainly there are many who are driven away from our faith and our churches because people are mean. Active “badness” will clearly hurt our ability to bring folks to the Lord.
For myself, I’m not as concerned about my “active badness” as I am about my lack of “active goodness” to draw people to my Lord.
 “Active goodness”—“active love”—takes work.
Active love requires overcoming inertia; it requires reaching out to those who make us uncomfortable, reaching out to those whom others might despise, those who annoy the tears out of us, those who interrupt the “important” in our lives, those who make us want to run and play with our comfortable, lovable, engaging Christian friends.
Active love requires a deliberate seeking for these folks, a deliberate disengagement from our friends and a deliberate perseverance in sticking with the uncomfortable and unimportant until we grow to love them through Christ and realize that we need them as much as they need us.
There was a reason God birthed Jesus in a stable.
Why have we built an inn around our Lord and sent those He loves to the barn where once He lay?

“And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love.”

Peter Scholtes

Dear God,
Change me. Let me actively seek and love and touch the unimportant, knowing there is no such person in your eyes.
Amen

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