Making a Safe Place for Yourself and Others

Making the main thing the main thing

Wow, the world is in turmoil. Insecurity and fear through the effects of the pandemic and lockdown have gripped so many.

Now, horrific footage of callous police suffocating George Floyd has sent our planet convulsing, with protests in every state of America and in 50 other nations.

And, unfortunately, other injustices have followed the reactions to his killing. Other innocent lives have been lost and businesses and lives destroyed.

I remember attending a series of lectures on Restoring Biblical Justice, during discipleship training for Mercy Ships. I was not looking forward to it. I expected a fairly angry man to give us a litany of injustices in the world and how we should fight them. (I had encountered quite a few people like that in the past.)

Instead, the man who came was filled with joy and the love of God, free from all the restrictions of anger.

I found myself thinking that this man must have an administrative position and not really see the injustices he was talking about — until he recounted stories of his walking past rows and rows of shop windows displaying children, some as young as five, who were up for sale for the night to lascivious middle aged men who chose them as sex objects as casually as one would select a packet of cigarettes.

How did he retain his joy and freedom of spirit when he was involved in such heartbreaking work, as he rescued these little victims?

His teaching changed my life.
  “Remember that you are there as an ambassador of Christ. If you let your preoccuption with the cause eclipse your commitment to Christ and your care for the individual, you’ll end up angry, embittered and burnt out. Keep your relationship with Christ uppermost, and your desire to reflect His image foremost.”

Listen to the words of Sheldon Vanauken in his wonderfully moving book, A Severe Mercy as he relates his life after his beloved wife died.

“I was one of those caught up in the mood and action of the 1960s, especially the Peace Movement (against the Vietnam War). Christ, I thought would surely have me oppose what appeared an unjust war. But the movement, whatever its ideals, did a good deal of hating. And Christ, gradually was pushed to the rear.”

We have every cause to speak out against the gross injustices that plague our fallen world — and we should — but let’s keep Jesus uppermost in our lives and in the way we respond to both the victims and the perpetators of injustice. His most powerful weapons in producing change were love, grace, forgiveness and healing. And how very effective those weapons are. They have persisted for over two thousand years and continue to win hardened, angry men and women with hearts of stone to His side, giving them sensitive, responsive, life-giving hearts of flesh.

It is as you stay close to Him and His ways that you feel safe in your inner being and make a safe place for others to feel His love through you.