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A Few Thoughts

I am afraid of heights. For that reason alone the lofty images of flying in a modern jet airliner at 35,000 feet are terrifying to me. In the aperture of 1993 I found myself doing just that flying over the heart of South America returning from my missionary assignment on the international field and caring not one bit whether the plane would crash or not. My primal fear had been transformed into absolute cold indifference, because of the pain that I was carrying at the time. My personal suffering had managed to flood the receptacle of all my hopes, dreams, feelings and faith and leave me drowning in unfeeling, hopeless discouragement. So, I didn’t care if the plane crashed. I didn’t care if we dove straight down at more than terminal velocity into the Bolivian altiplano. My theological training, my pastoral experience and my faith in God felt useless. All of my degrees and personal knowledge felt like a lump of coal in my arsenal of faith. It didn’t even make a good rock to throw at it all. My hurt was so profound, I just didn’t care.

Upon returning to the United States and injecting myself back into church, albeit with a numb sense of disorientation, I found that most other people also didn’t care. To some I had become a persona non grata, a onetime shining light transformed into something irreparably broken. To others I had become a pariah who no longer had the grace of man and most assuredly did not have the grace of God, to whom the only thing they were able to say was, “God can’t use you anymore.”

Our churches are full of people flying at 35,000 feet who from the outside often look fine, under control and prospering, but who are carrying a load so heavy of pain, brokenness and estrangement that they don’t care if the plane in which they are riding goes hurtling to the earth only to crash and burn. Or they are so overcome by the power and deception of their suffering that they would choose to ignore the grace of their Lord and reject all of His good for the momentary pleasure of satisfying their feelings. They would consider discarding the way of Christ and replacing it with the way of man.

The depth of this experience is no trifle. The Christian experience does not inoculate us from the reality that the world without Christ struggles, has struggled and will continue to struggle with pain, suffering and loss. The reality is also clear that the church, not being immune from the experience, must confront it with the power that it has. Yet the church often fails in this confrontation, opting to isolate and insulate itself from those who are struggling with this dynamic, or, worse, excommunicating the aggrieved parties as the church hurls them to the dogs.

From the Introduction of Righter’s Block.

http://www.crossbooks.com/BookStore/BookStoreBookDetails.aspx?bookid=52473#

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