The Compassion Cure

I’ve been re-reading the story of Ruth in the Old Testament, and have been reacquainting myself with the power of compassion to change lives.

Most of us need compassion, but very few of us have ever really experienced it to the depths of our being.  Instead of being received at our worst, we’ve received our worst wounds and deepest rejections in that place.

And we’ve done the same to others.   Compassion, in other words, is a rare commodity in this life.    It is not natural to fallen human beings.

What masquerades for compassion is enabling, where we help someone else to sin or erase the consequences of their sins so we can feel special and important and needed.   We use their problem to validate ourselves and play the hero.

Then they become dependent on our rescuing as we become dependent on their praise and ongoing dependency on us.   It’s crack cocaine for the ego.

But it’s not true compassion.   Dependency and its twin, perpetual childhood, is not kindness.  It’s a very cruel type of bondage–one that gets lots of applause.

What we see in Ruth is something different.   We see a young woman who, at personal risk, goes into the field to gather up leftover grain.    She’s taking responsibility and working hard.   She’s caring for an aged mother-in-law.  And she left everything behind to do it.

But all that would have been in vain had not a powerful local man, Boaz, noticed her and favored her with protection and provision.

Ruth keenly feels her status as a foreigner, an outsider, and an intruder.   In that society, her people the Moabites were excluded from the civic life of Israel and were never permitted to marry into Israel.   Children of that marriage were excluded for several generations.

All this was to protect God’s people from corruption, from being tempted to follow other gods.   But it left Ruth in a very difficult position.   She really was at the mercy of the locals.

Up stepped Boaz who favored her over and over again.

In such a place of lowliness and exclusion, the power of Boaz’s compassion was amplified.

She desperately needed food–and lots of it.   All she could do was hope the reapers made mistakes so she could forage behind them.    And once the barley and wheat harvests were over–there would be little else to eat.

She desperately needed protection–a young foreign woman, outside the clan system, could be raped with impunity in one of many isolated settings and there’d be nobody to rise up and avenge her.   She really was on her own.

Boaz noticed Ruth’s deepest needs and freely gave out of his excess to provide both sustenance and security.    And it deeply touched her and brought up that inevitable question, “Why are you doing this?”

We’re not used to be so undeservedly and freely loved.    So we tend to ask, “What’s the catch?”    With true compassion, there isn’t one.   But the joy of bringing joy and peace to someone oppressed and afraid is huge.

Grace, in other words, is its own reward!

What do we need most when we are at our worst and incapable of meeting our own greatest of needs?    It’s compassion.    A compassion that empowers us with undeserved love to take risks again, to take responsibility again, and to trust again.

Compassion is the cure for rejection.   It breaks the cycle of condemnation and punishment, freeing us to notice others with the same need we had and motivating us to meet it.

For some reason, we have a hard time believing God is a God of compassion.    We see Him as a stern, unforgiving, remote and punishing Person.

Then, in the name of religion, we practice these ungracious things to one another and call it godliness.   Church becomes the last place one goes to for compassion, instead of the first place.

Jesus enabled nobody, but He had compassion on everybody–even the nastiest of Pharisees.     Therefore, we are not beyond the reach of God’s compassion nor are we beyond our utter need for it.

Our great task, each and every day, is to receive the compassion of Christ every single day where we need it most–and then spend the excess compassion on others.

Recovering From Rejection

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a magic wand that would not only wipe away all rejection, but all the scars and damage rejection has done in our lives?   But there isn’t.

Instead, I have found seasons of rejection set me up to seek a deeper plunge into the depths of God’s all-accepting, never rejecting grace.

Without accepting any of my evil behavior, God through Christ made a way to accept me–even as a rejected failure.   He loves and even prefers losers.  He picks up thrown-away people.    He seems to get a particular thrill out of ministering His acceptance to a special degree to those who are most rejected.  He justifies sinners without justifying sin.

And when we seek this deeper level of God’s acceptance from a deeper place of rejection, we find it all over again.   At our unlovely worst and foulest, where we are most helpless and most wretched, we find the love we have been seeking all our lives is seeking us.    Then we cycle back into the disapproving, rejecting world of people and find ourselves needing a fresh dose of His grace and cycle back into it at a deeper level.   And on it goes.

Ever time we cycle back into grace on the other side of rejection, something hard melts within us and we grow more settled, more free from the terror of human rejection, more secure in His unconditional approval and beyond rejection love.    And as we embrace His declarations about us as new creatures in Christ, as saints who are forever part of His family, our new identity grows.

Just as rejected people reject people, graced people grace people.   The most rejecting, the most disapproving, the most blaming and shaming who the most spiritually sick, are declaring for all the world to see their absolute poverty and utter need of God’s acceptance.    And the most grace-giving and patient, who are the most spiritually healthy, are declaring to all the world they themselves have received great grace.

They, too, needed it the most and humbly received much more than they need.   So they give the excess away freely–even to the undeserving.    Grace, instead of rejection, flows from them at greater and greater levels as they receive more and more grace.

Just as a river cuts through granite and forms a canyon, grace when flowing out from us changes the contours of our soul.    We get used to admitting our own need for grace, of receiving more than we need and giving it away.    We treat others the way God continually treats us.  Graced people grace people.

All this to say that recovering from rejection begins with bringing the vast ocean of our rejection to Christ, and parking in His presence until we see Him being rejected for us and offering us the Father’s full acceptance as a gift–and receive this gift in our powerlessness.

Then, slowly, we are taught the opposite of rejection and, from experience, begin to know what it feels like to be accepted by God and to stand more securely in His unfathomable acceptance.    We begin to recognize others–even those who have rejected us–as deeply needy souls.   We begin to realize we are no better and no worse than they are.     They, too, need grace.    They, too, are prisoners of conditional love, of performance-based approval seeking, and therefore of rejection.

Recovering from rejection is a gradual process and God always does a thorough job when working on souls.    Instead of trying to be perfect and rejection-proofing our lives, let come to the table each day and partake of God’s grace.     There’s more than enough for all!

In Twelve Steps language, we admit we are powerless over rejection and enslaved to it.   We come to believe in a grace-giving God who can restore us to sanity.     So we quit trying to self-manage our problem and look out and away from ourselves to Christ.   We turn our lives and our wills over to Him, and experience a spiritual awakening as a result of His accepting grace.   Then we share it with others.

Next time I will discuss some specific habits and tools that help us be healed from rejection and follow Him into a full, rich life of grace.

Rejection Issues

Like most of you, I know from personal experience what it’s like to be rejected.

We usually experience rejection in our teen years, or in our families growing up.    And it profoundly marks us.

Unlike disagreements, where the issues are on center stage and hopefully worked through, rejection always makes it personal.     It becomes a contest for control, a winner-take-all battle that leaves no possibility of relationship when it’s over.

All disagreement is seen as a betrayal, and there is an expectation of absolute, lock-step agreement….or else!    Where there is conditional, performance-based, approval-seeking love, there will inevitably be rejection.

The end result is “former”:   former friends, former spouses, former partnerships, former jobs, former churches, former communities, former lives.    The rejector cuts off the relationship and wipes us out of their life.    And there’s few things more painful than rejection.

Rejection is therefore a powerful, manipulative tool to get what we want out of insecure people trapped inside the same system.   The reason is rejected people are so wounded by rejection they are willing to pay the bribes and capitulate to the blackmail.   Rejection usually works!

Until next time….

Then the ante is upped and the demands increase and the push for dominance is becomes insatiable.    Then they are appeased and the sacrifice is made once again…..until next time and the next and the next.

All of us, if we’re honest, have rejected others and been rejected by others.  None of us has entirely clean hands, and all of us justify our own rejecting decisions while harshly condemning the rejections done by others.

Even the Perfect Person, Jesus Christ, experienced heaps of rejection at many points and deserved none of it.    Which tells us rejection is an unavoidable part of our fallen world and will raise its ugly head in our lives sooner or later.

So how does one live in a rejection-filled world?   How does one emerge from living under the fear of rejection?    How does one reject rejection and stay connected to those we love–even when they fail us?

Like so many things, our first step is self-honesty.    Where and at whose hands have we experienced rejection?   How did it mark us?  And where have we been tempted to reject another and/or succumbed to that temptation?  How did it mark them?

Our second step is repentance–to admit our own wrongs in this area and face our choices to allow disagreements to wrongly and unnecessarily end relationships.   Usually because we ourselves have been rejected.

The first rejection game is “beat you to the punch”.   Perceived rejection–if I think someone is going to reject me–leads to deserved rejection–I’ll do something outrageous to provoke rejection and break the unresolved tension of conditional love.  Acting out and acting up leads to rejection.

The second rejection game is  “hide-and-seek..or else”.    I withdraw from a relationship without telling the other person.    Then I expect to be immediately pursued and lavished with flattery and ego-stroking–and re-enter the relationship having my importance validated.

But if the other person doesn’t realize they’re being given an unspoken test, or if they respond too slowly or in a way that doesn’t stroke the ego, we get doubly hurt and give ourselves permission to end the relationship–justifying it and blaming their lack of pursuit for our own game’s outcome.

Such games are a credit to nobody, are dishonest, and leave a long trail of wounded souls and unnecessary rejections behind us.   Eventually we end up in a very lonely place–the isolated land of self-rejection and self-hatred.

More on this topic the next time!

Inflated Expectations

Most of us, when we hear the word inflation, think of rising prices and the value of our dollar going down, down, down.    But there’s another kind of inflation at work:   an inflation of expectations.

Many young adults expect to start high up in an organization with great paying jobs.   Their grandparents started “at the bottom” and “worked their way up”.      Many of them also expect to immediately live at the economic levels of their parents and finance this lifestyle with debt.   Their grandparents lived in apartments and small places for years, saving up until they paid cash for such things as cars, homes, and appliances.

And our grandparents were twice as happy, on average, and made four times less money, on average.   Hmmmm….

I don’t think this kind of inflation, this desire to live more prosperously and highly than our parents is new.   What’s new is inflation rate–the speed at which and the heights to which all this is expected to be fulfilled.

Schools and Universities have long documented something called “grade inflation”, fueled, in part, by the expectations of students and their indebted parents of success.    Bad grades get in the way of it, so more people deserve higher grades and ought to receive them for less work.    We therefore train our young adults to get more for less, to expect more for less, and to demand more for less.

American shoppers have become experts at waiting for deep discounts at Christmas, at expecting the most for the least possible cost.    What else explains the rise of Wal-Mart and the rise of cheap, Chinese imports.    If we didn’t demand lots for little, such stuff wouldn’t sell and such “discounters” wouldn’t be multiplying in our nation.

I bring these examples in various areas of life to show a pattern:    we want more and more for less and less, and complain louder and louder when it doesn’t happen.

For example, our expectations for governments, and of politicians, are greatly inflated.    Our grandparents largely expected to solve their own problems, and saw receiving a “hand-out” as a shameful thing.    Now we subsidize large corporations and large segments of our population at increasing costs, and wonder why there’s a deficit.    We want the most from our government, and want somebody else to pay for it all.   And we vote against responsible people who try to address this issue.

Many of the couples I counsel have this problem of inflated expectations of their spouse, and of amplified complaints and bitterness when their partner doesn’t “measure up”.     Many of the troubled individuals I help, who are wracked with guilt and who are nasty to live with, expect perfection out of themselves and others–and punish themselves and others without mercy when they fail to perform.

The vastly inflated self, and its tyrannical conscience and insatiable “wanter”, is running amok.    It’s insanity.  And a terrible destroyer of relationships.   “I expect it”, “I deserve it”, and “I demand it” is a hellish, unholy trinity that soon turns into “I will judge you”, “I will punish you”, and “I will sacrifice you” if we don’t get our way.

Even in Christian circles and in many churches, our expectations are hugely inflated and no churches and pastors will ever be good enough.    Rates of dismissal of pastors, and dissolution of congregations, are skyrocketing.     The result is much wreckage and disillusionment among our young.   And there’s nothing particularly Christian about it.

So try writing out what you expect of yourself, other people, and institutions and ask, “Can this person or group possibly do all this?”    And if the answer is “no!”, then the problem isn’t them.    It’s our own inflated expectations and our grandiose ego behind these demands.

Tame this inflation, shrink yourself down to small and lowly sized, and you might find yourself much more at peace and far more grateful and satisfied.    And if you doubt me, just ask your grandpa and grandma!

Double Revelation

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day before the sacrifice of God’s Lamb for human sin.

It is a day where we see two realities:   human sin in all its ugliness, viciousness, and destructiveness;  Divine love in all its beauty, self-sacrifice, and redeeming power to turn greatest evil into greatest good.

It was the day Judas’ betrayal happened.    Selling his Master for 30 silver coins in an attempt to force His hand and make Him save Himself and bring in the Kingdom–all so Judas could be rich and powerful.   And using the kiss of friendship as the signal for arrest–one of the most painful moments of Christ’s life.

This is the man who received from Christ the favored morsel at the Passover meal, who sat in the place of honor next to Christ, the one and only Judean disciple in a company of Galileans.   Instead he became the tool of Satan himself and agent of darkness.

It was the day Peter’s denial happened.    This lead disciple objected to Christ’s prediction that “they would ALL fall away”.   Not me!  No way!   I’m better than that.   I’m beyond that.   I’m above that.   Even if everyone else fails, I won’t!

This same man wielded a hidden sword and sliced the ear off a national leader’s servant–threatening to turn a peaceful arrest into a bloodbath.   But after running away, he kept following at a distance.  Unable to accept his own cowardice, he was let into the high priest’s courtyard and tried to hide in plain sight.

Three times he was outed, and three times he denied knowing Christ rather than risk his own skin–adding multiplied shame to these deepest proofs of his cowardice.     Luke tells us Peter only realized what he did when Christ looked expressively at him.   Then he got away and wept bitter tears.

It was the day His Disciples all abandoned Him.   The rest of the disciples fare no better–they all ran away and hightailed it back to their hideout.   So much for sticking with Jesus and proving their loyalty.

Yes, today is a day we remember how utterly and miserably every human being in Christ’s life failed Him.

And have I failed to mention how His enemies behaved?     The secret arrest, midnight trial, procuring of false witnesses, pressure on Christ to self-incriminate–all these are violations of their own rules!  It also violated “Thou shalt not murder”.   And then getting Rome to do their dirty work for them–to the point of denying the Kingship of God and saying, “We have no king but Caesar.”

I could go on and on.    But you get the point.   None of us come through this story unscathed or smelling like a rose.   None of us have much to brag about, and quite a bit to be ashamed about–even if we’re the only ones who know about it.    And if I stopped here, I supposed we could have one big pity party.

But the day before the Day is also a revelation of “in spite of” divine love.   In the face of wretched failure, Christ still broke the bread and offered the cup to His disciples and told them it was “for the remission of your sins”.

Every bit of agony, every blow of every fist and every rip of every strand of every lashing, was done for us.    All the mockery and mistreatment, all the abuse and hatred He bore, was part of our redemption price.     It was God’s love that sent Him to earth, God’s love that freighted Him with all our sins, and God’s love that turned aside the Hell-judgment we deserved from us–pouring it out on Christ instead.

It was Christ’s love that accepted this assignment.    It was Christ’s love that surrendered in the Garden, and received the whole experience at the hands of His friends and His enemies as part of our rescue.    He didn’t have to do it, and we certainly didn’t deserve to have it done for us.

And it’s that gap between the sheer freedom He had, and the sheer unworthiness we had, that reveals the depths to which Divine love would go to deliver us from evil–even our own evil.

We need salvation.   And we have a Savior.  We need redemption.   And we have a Redeemer.  We need Someone to love us at our worst, and remove all our sins.   So God sent His Son.

It’s a double revelation–our great need as sinners and His far greater grace for sinners.

Great News!

I have great news on this week leading up to Easter Sunday!

All that is wrong with you and me, all that is selfish about you and me, every failure and every corrupt deed, every regret, every shameful thing, every foul word, bad attitude, and evil thought has been decisively dealt with upon the Cross.

The perfectly good status you and I would like to be true of us–credit for being a perfect person, a perfect parent, a perfect spouse, a perfect worker or boss, a perfect student, a perfect friend, and a perfect worshiper of God–can be ours!

All that horrific pressure to perform, all of that burden of failure, all that unspoken competition and open rivalry to outdo and out-perform others can be gone!

All that anger from trying to be deserving and never getting what you think you deserve, or of being mistreated and abused and victimized by injustice, can be quenched forever by the Ultimate Victim who turned the tables on evil and emerged the Greatest Victor.

The frustration of conditional love, of trying to be lovable and loved by fickle human beings, to not disappoint them and be rejected or abandoned by them, can be settled and settled for good.

All the wounds that drive us to try even harder to be good enough, popular enough, smart enough, strong enough, and big enough don’t have to drive us anymore.

In fact, they can drive us right into the Arms of Someone who was wounded for our transgressions so we could be free.

We can safely admit we have this huge problem because there is already a solution!   We’re all in the same boat–however successful and “together” we appear on the surface.

Most Christians understood that Christ paid for sins on the cross, but they don’t quite understand that He permanently removed all our sins from our account. They are all gone and gone for good.   Our record is expunged.   The books are clean and our account is fully settled.

But that doesn’t put money in the bank!

So Christ lived a perfect life in all areas His whole life without exception–earning a righteous, ultimately successful status before God.  Perfection!

And when Christ is allowed to serve as our substitute on the Cross, He not only removes all sin by faith.   He fills our account with infinite riches and we are credited with being righteous in all areas at a perfect level.

Such an exchange sounds too good to be true, and this is where true faith is most called for.

The moment I entrust my fate to such an arrangement, putting all of my weight on Christ and letting Him enact this exchange of sin for righteousness for me, is the moment I become righteous in God’s sight as a gift.  Our trust is credited as righteousness.

But instead of this arrangement leading to a license to indulged evils, it melts my heart to be loved so greatly and so well and to such a degree at such great cost.

The Bible calls such a gift at such a great cost to do so much good for the least undeserving a single word.  And that word is grace.

The Bible calls the motivation behind such a gift of grace a single word.   And that word is love.

Not the pop music definition of that word.   But redemptive love, all-condition-satisfying love, self-sacrificing for “those who deserve punishment the most” love.

That is why it is such great news–especially when we the most keenly aware of our wretchedness and unworthiness.    We need a Savior, and at times like this we finally see it and admit our need.

And we have a Savior!  One who does not merely remove all the bad, but who credits our account with all His infinite perfection and absolute success in satisfying God in every way possible forever and ever.

Now that’s a thought worth thinking about on this week leading up to Easter!