Month: February 2013

Alan
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

I am departing from my usual format and subject matter for “Meditations for the Contemplative Christian” this week in order to write about a friend of mine named Alan. I have known Alan for about ten years, having met him at the evening service of a church I no longer attend. It was immediately apparent to me that this was a human being who had been through some terrible experiences in his life. He was, in this world’s eyes, what might be described as “scary looking.” By both his appearance and manner it was apparent that Alan was mentally ill.

This fact did not alarm me, as I had worked with people with severe emotional and psychological problems in the past, so I made a point to talk with Alan. Within a short period of time we became friends and after every service Alan and I would sit in my car and talk for a while. During this time he shared with me a story of childhood abuse that remains the worst story of this kind I have ever personally heard. He had grown up in a family in which both parents were mentally ill. He had been sexually abused by strangers they allowed into their home. Presumably this was true for some of his siblings as well because, with one exception, his dispersed brothers and sisters were all troubled to the point of barely being able to function in the world. As for Alan his abuse at home had been followed by merciless bullying throughout his school years, mostly because of the haunted appearance he displayed even then. By the time I met him he was on permanent disability and living at home struggling to take proper care of his invalid father by himself.

As I said his was one of the saddest stories I’ve heard.

I wish I could say that Alan found the love he was starving for in the Church, but this was not the case. If there was one thing he made crystal clear to me it was that people in the many churches he attended had not reached out to help him. I saw this in my own church of the time. Most people avoided contact with Alan altogether. The few who spoke with him at our services did so for a few minutes at most and then politely, but firmly excused themselves. This pattern had basically repeated itself with every congregation he encountered…and that included the leaders of those congregations.

After I left the church where I met Alan I continued to call him every few weeks to continue our relationship. As the years went by I witnessed him become more and more isolated, and more and more difficult to talk with about spiritual things. Alan simply could not understand why the people who bore the name of the Son of God he had read about in the Bible did not reach out to someone as obviously lost and lonely as he was. During these long conversations basically all I could do was listen. He did most of the talking because he had almost no one in his life to talk to. When I did find moments to speak it was very difficult to communicate the grace of God to a person who had found the church to be not much different from the rest of a world that “kept its distance.”

By this time Alan’s father had died and he was living alone. He had also begun to drink heavily.

Last month my calls went unanswered. Finally I received a disconnected phone message when I dialed his number. The next day I drove to Alan’s home and found it dark and empty. I left a message in his mailbox asking him to please call me and put the flag up. It ended up being the mail man who found it and contacted me. My friend Alan, he told me, had been found dead in his house by the police in mid-January. By the condition of his body it was apparent that he had died around Christmas. The mailman did not know the cause of death, but I could guess. Alan had recently had the flu and never sounded completely recovered from it. I suspect he died of pneumonia aggravated by alcoholism (It apparently had not been considered a suicide because there was no mention of his death in the local media. Had he clearly ended his own life there probably would have been.) I could find no obituary, no notice about a funeral, no mention of his death whatsoever.

Alan was 52 when he died. I’m not sure he ever really progressed emotionally beyond the age of the young boy who had known only abuse. He died alone. I can only hope that, when no one else was there in that empty house, the God Alan had once asked to save him was there with him as he left this world behind.

The very sad truth is that if Alan still retained any faith in God at that point it was mostly in spite of Christians, not because of them. That is why I’m writing this article in his memory. I write in the hope that those who read it might make a point to reach out to the “Alan’s” in their own congregations, even if that means resisting fears about the emotionally disturbed that often are not justified. But when I remember what my friend encountered in too many 21st Century American churches I cannot help but question if I write in vain.

Also, as I ponder what the Bible says about judgment starting among the people of God I sincerely wonder if part of that judgment will not be for our neglect of lost souls like Alan…in the one place where those souls might have reasonably expected to find the radical love of Jesus Christ displayed.

May God have mercy on us all…

Best Friends
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

What would happen if we really knew God wanted to be with us?

It is one thing to believe that the Lord loves us in some remote, impersonal way and quite another to believe He likes us. Author Brennan Manning once said that if he sensed someone truly liked him he would lower all his defenses and expose himself emotionally to that person. He used this as an analogy to our relationship with Jesus.

When a believer is grappling with his or her sin, and the fear and shame that accompany it, it is tempting to see God as only a stern judge, maybe even an angry being who demands a perfection from us that we do not have the strength to attain. We project on to Him the disgust and self-hatred we feel towards ourselves and assume that He feels the same way about us as we do.

But what if we Christians were to dare to believe, even during such terrible moments, that Jesus Christ is our friend? We know He is to be our Lord, our King, and our Master. Unfortunately we sometimes, to our own loss, focus only on the aspects of God that set Him apart from and far above us while forgetting this same God also became one of us. For the people who bear His name it is absolutely true that Jesus is Lord, King and Master. What we so easily forget is that he is also our Friend.

Friends, real friends, want to be with us. If they are believers these people love us in the name of God but, as friends, they also like us and when we really come to know this is true we respond by removing all the walls our insecurity has built around us. We feel the joy that comes from knowing that at least one other person in the world likes us as we are, where we are, and desires to be with us. Even the ugly side of us, our struggle with sin, does not change that affection.

For some reason it is hard to imagine Jesus sitting with His disciples and just enjoying their company. We have a tendency to look at the three years they were together and imagine the time was always spent in the “serious business” of the Kingdom of God. Yet surely during those years there was also time for Jesus and the disciples to bond in the kind of friendships like-minded people living and traveling together naturally create. Over time they must have come to know one another well, to laugh as well as cry together. Think of the best church small groups of today and you might begin to get some idea of how intimate a group this must have been. Yes, there was some friction between the disciples; but that too is part of any friendship that goes beyond the surface level.

In the middle of all this was Jesus who, at the Last Supper, simply declared what the disciples must have already known to be true. He called them friends for that was truly what they had become to Him…and He was there’s as well.

Right now you, Christian, are also His friend and He is even more than that to you, whether you know it yet or not. Our Lord is also the One who both loves and likes you perfectly. Think for a time on that reality and its ramifications and let your heart be joyful. Jesus Christ is not just your friend. He is your best friend.

Healing is a Journey
by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved.

As the Church has appropriated some of the therapeutic stress of the culture we live in, the term “healing” has become somewhat of a buzzword among Evangelicals. Of course the Bible speaks often of healing; the Gospel promising us that, with repentance, our wounds will be bound up by the merciful hands of the Great Physician.

However Scripture also implies that the final healing of our emotional ills will not be complete until God wipes away our every tear at the Resurrection. Here on earth, in the meanwhile, we will always carry some degree of pain from wounds not wholly healed. So, for now, our recovery is a journey towards a final destination we have not yet reached. The reason Christians need to know that this is so is because bitterness often finds it place in the still unhealed hearts of people who have come to believe that perfect emotional health is possible right now.

It is true that a few of the “ancient saints” in our midst, men and woman in our churches who have known the Lord for many years, seem to have reached such a deep level of peace that it would be tempting to believe they have already “arrived”. But I suspect that if they were asked most would admit that they are not yet without pain and heartache. These believers may be much closer to the end of their pilgrimage home then we are, but they are still on the road. They have powerfully known the Balm of Gilead but they still are in need of it.

Christian Psychologists have sometimes been heard to complain about clients who expect that a lifetime of damage from emotional, physical or sexual abuse will be “fixed” in a few weeks of counseling. Such unreasonable expectations are sometimes defended by pointing to a Deity who Himself says that He can do the humanly impossible and indeed it is true, He can. However our Lord also has told us that his ways and ours are not always synchronized. God often, perhaps most often, heals over time. He is not the God of the “crash diet” or the “get rich quick” scheme. He is the God of the tree that comes to maturity only after growing for two centuries. He is the God of the tortoise as well as the Cheetah.

The process of losing our emotional imperfections will begin as we surrender our profoundly broken lives to Jesus Christ. But this will happen over a lifetime and not be completed until we leave this fallen world behind some day to be with Him. For now our healing is about getting better, not about getting there.

The Balanced Life
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The word “balance” is not always associated with the Christian walk. It does not appear in Scripture. Jesus and the apostles never used the word itself. But balance is implied throughout the Bible whenever it speaks to living the life God desires us to live.

First, though, the word has to be defined. The most important part of this definition is to state what it is not and that is “moderation”. Moderation, as we normally use it, refers to never doing too much or too little of some activity. Moderation is implicitly amoral. For instance it is a good word for a Christian to use when speaking of doing too much or too little exercise because exercise, in and of itself, is not immoral. The problem comes when you try to apply the term to something like sexual liaisons out of wedlock. We are not to indulge in a moderate amount of such activity; we are to avoid it altogether. In the context of living the life of a disciple the best understanding of balance is the avoidance of extremes in areas that are not innately sinful for the purpose of properly enjoying the gifts of God.

An example might be dealing with legalism or licentiousness in regards to our freedom in Christ. The Apostle Paul dealt with these extremes in many of his letters to the churches. Some persons in these churches expected “true” believers to hold to Jewish practices and restrictions like circumcision or not eating meat sacrificed to idols. In other churches the opposite extreme held sway. For instance all kinds of sexual sin was being committed in the 1st Century Gentile churches. This happened because some of the early non-Jewish Christians believed they were free to let their physical bodies be engaged in such activities because their spirit was separate from those bodies and would remain unsullied (this belief was a forerunner to the later heresy of Gnosticism). It was also often the result of simple ignorance of the sexual standards Jesus Himself upheld as normative for a holy people. Whether to one extreme or the other these wrong teachings and cases of ignorance in the churches were corrected by Paul and the other apostles.

The need for such correction is an old story and today we face similar extremes in living out our faith. Some fundamentalists, for instance, tell us that anything that is not specifically mentioned in the Bible should be anathema to the true believer. Some would go so far as to say that all art, music and film without a specifically Christian message are forbidden. In fact more radical fundamentalists even take that a step further telling us that the mediums themselves are evil; usually using some Old Testament verses taken out of context for justification. On the other extreme we see what might be called “Loose Evangelicals”, people who feel that they can watch or listen to almost anything without it negatively affecting their souls and their relationship with God. Here, too, is the need for Godly balance. Asceticism for the sake of asceticism is unprofitable. Undiscerning consumption of everything the World says is good is unprofitable as well.

Perhaps we should seek to be as balanced as our Lord who fasted in the wilderness but, shortly thereafter, turned the water into wine at a wedding party. His Holy Spirit can keep us from going to unhealthy extremes if we ask Him to help us lead balanced lives. In Jesus we see a life lived in perfect balance yet with great passion. With the Spirit’s help we can model ourselves after the One who truly knows the best way and come to experience the abundant life He has promised us.