Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. (Ephesians 4:2)“'Cause I need you more than I needed before and now where I'll find comfort, God knows. 'Cause you left me just when I needed you most.” the song made popular in the 70’s by Randy van Warmer went. I always thought that this was such a plaintive song, full of the sadness of being left because you made a mistake.
Putting up with other people is hard. People do a lot of stupid things to each other and sometimes it is just plain hard to forgive and forget.
Several years back, I worked with ex-inmates. In the church I had planted, I began a ministry called Real Freedom and even for a while had a half-way house of sorts called Grace Place.
The dynamic among ex-inmates is interesting. In general, they feel disenfranchised from society so they do not have many friends that are not like they are. The problem with this is that they are ex-inmates for a reason: they were inmates. And they were inmates because they had done something wrong and had been put in incarceration.
They were friends with each other. But the friendship was tenuous. Every once in a while, frustrations of life would explode and they would have a massive fight. The fight would be from several things: either one had taken advantage of the other and the others took sides, or they had just gotten angry with each other.
Whatever the case, they were no longer friends. For a while. Then one day, they would all decide to let bygones be bygones and they would all be “friends” again.
This was mainly due, not to their powers of forgiveness, but to the fact that they had no other friends. They were kind of stuck in their group.
As the church, we tried out best to break them of these habits and to learn to accept each other on a different level. Sometimes it worked, but mostly – due to inexperience on my part, I think – it didn’t. After a while, it just got too tiring. Add to that the fact that one of the leaders was lying to me and I turned out to be the only one who didn’t know it, and the work was destroyed.
I suppose that was in large part because I did not think like them. I did not have the same mindset.
And quite frankly, although I loved them and sacrificed a lot to help them, I do not want that mindset.
A lot of things have happened to us in the course of our almost 40 year ministry. And a lot of those are bad, unfortunately. It tends to warp your perspective.
But, on the other hand, I have always had a strong Pollyanna side to me. I tend to believe the best of people. I have known pastors and leaders who had gone so far into their ministries with people like this that have lost that side of their personalities. They become bitter after a while and begin to see the whole church in that light.
But the problem is that we are supposed to be a support group, helping each other, bearing with each other in love.
With all of the foolishness that we who consider ourselves holy get into, we have no right to be really put out with others when they make mistakes. We are supposed to be a community of love in the power and glory of Jesus.
That is what people need. A group that loves them in spite of their inadequacies, yet also expects them to get better. The church is a hospital, not a hospice where people come to die in their sins.
Let’s act like one.
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