Souls or Situations?

Months ago, my husband Caleb and I were on our way to weekly bible study and as I was rocking out to my Thursday night playlist tunes (I love karaoke car time), we got a call that changed my mood in an instant. The call was to schedule in the upcoming weeks, a day to meet up with a certain set of people who I was much less than thrilled to see, to put it nicely. Caleb was polite and pushed love through his voice but as I overheard the details and the date set, my heart flipped a switch to close off entirely, shifting my care free mood to quiet seething. The call ended, the information was shared and I sat silent. A couple minutes had crawled by when Caleb questioned my strict silence to which I responded with hot and indignant frustration as to why I would absolutely refuse to attend the newly planned event. Some more crawling minutes passed and then my husband gave simple but firm wisdom that in a second changed my entire outlook on life as I knew it in my small mind:  “We need to care more about their souls than the situation.”

Time to be real: I’m reluctant to admit that I have a very feisty and bitter side to my personality. If I am wronged or someone I love is wronged, the ‘me against the world’ mentality in me rises, birthing a very angry and hateful monster inside. I feed this monster occasionally whenever the thing that caused the hurt attempts to come close, but once fed the monster gets very ugly. Passive aggressiveness is its weapon of choice so I will of course ooze with politeness but fierce anger hides behind every word. It is 100% my least flattering side but it is there regardless because I’ve let the situations surrounding all aspects of deeds done wrong to become the only thing I see.

The thing is that the situation I mentioned above wasn’t even my situation directly to be mad about- it was Caleb’s.  Instead of choosing to be fixated on the situation that he had every right in the world to be irate, even hateful about, he chose to see the souls involved. It’s one thing when you’re implored to forgive 70x7 during a good sermon but it goes to a whole new level when you see it actively lived out in the face of the unforgivable.

Days later, I was reading through Acts and my eyes were opened to a small sentence that I’d skimmed over so many times. Acts 7 is the story of Stephen, the martyr. The main body of the chapter is this man, Stephen, against accusation, presenting the gospel to a hoard of officials. Despite his confidence and assertion, he gets drug from the city and stoned to death. But the astounding part is set in verse 60- as each thrown stone shattered his body, Stephen prayed with his last words, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!”  

I read that and was shocked.

Unlike Jesus who was the only ever perfectly perfect man, this Stephen, a human like you and me, urged God to pardon the very people who stoned him to death. I don’t know about you, but the very real human part of me wouldn’t have forgiveness at the top of my to-do list if I was being pounded by rocks. The very fact that I could say that so assuredly bothered me but through the example of my husband and this Acts 7:60 account, God started a flicker in me to want to love people with that much fervor.

In my last blog post I briefly explained my reasonings for having issues with confidence and rejection, and those same situations also raised a lot of grudges. Grudges lead to the lie that you have to be guarded; such self-protection leads to excessive inward focus, which in turn leads to readied judgment and dismissal of anyone on the outside. It’s a nasty circle that benefits not a single person and once you get started on its merry-go-round, it’s hard to find a way off.

Something I noticed in myself is that I would break with compassion over the pain and needs of strangers. I would see someone out in public who wore hurt on their face and everything in me would ache to love on them. But opposite to that, if someone who I knew personally, who had failed me at a time and it laid unresolved, was facing a problem, I would buck back in apprehension.

~ (Keep in mind that I’m not adding to this mix the situations where there is continual agresssive hurt caused and it’s necessary to distance yourself.) ~ 

This is where my heart lived all too often, guarded and holding a monster in my heart’s clutches as retaliation whenever needed. It wasn’t even something I was totally aware of, it was a habit. Yet it became blatantly obvious that day in the car.

This kind of God’s heart, souls over situations love isn’t the safe option. To love and forgive people with this kind of love is to love defencelessly and honestly, that’s frightening. But then again, when does God asks us to live safely according to our own standards? It is the very core of the gospel itself that God died for the worst of the worst, and we are invited countless times to love others with the same unsafe love that Christ has for us. 

That person at work who is constantly grading on your nerves-God loves them, that friend who shattered your trust-God adores them, that family member that left you broken-God desperately desires their heart, and so on. Whatever your situation may be, God loves the soul involved infinitely more.

As I fought desperately with this topic, God asked me to step outside of my simple understanding and step into His for a clearer view. He showed me that that person that I have a problem with the most, He loves them more than I can imagine ever loving my husband or the love I’ll have for my own children.

In that light, where did I find the right to hold pieces from any situation higher than the soul created by their Heavenly Father? This kind of thinking doesn’t dismiss the pain caused or bid it ok to happen again, but God willingly heals those parts when we give up our grip on the details and forgive the do-er. We may be the only piece of God’s heart some people will ever come in contact with before leaving this life; that alone should commission each of us to love people with abandon to the “but-what-about...” that we can cling to.

This is something I’m actively learning but I deeply want God to break my heart with what breaks His, for everyone not only the ones that I have no record of wounds with yet. Sin is innate in every human being so how many innumerable times have we wounded God’s heart and yet He loves us deeper than we have the capacity to comprehend! When we choose to dive into people’s lives, forgiveness and unconditioned love in front of us, God covers us in the areas where we’re left undefended and through that we can be used mightily for His name.

The most confronting verse I’ve read that sums it up perfectly is in Luke 6:32-

 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.  And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Let’s hold tightly and proudly to our title as Children of God and live this command out without hesitation.