Thursday, 17 July 2008 06:18
Today it's 7 months since we stepped on the plane for Russia. In those 7 months, God has shown me more about the ugliness of my own heart than I ever wanted to know.
I think best in analogies, and to me this time in Russia has been like making strawberry jam. When you make jam, you put the berries into a pot with a little water, then add sugar. There's a lot of sugar in the recipe: in fact, when you look into the pot, sugar is almost all you see. It's very white; very sweet. Then, you turn up the heat. It's surprising how quickly the sugar dissolves, seems to disappear altogether. And once the jam gets really boiling, the scum starts to rise to the top.
My heart-scum tends to take the form of resentment, irritability and lovelessness, especially toward believers, because I have higher expectations from them. Other missionaries are no exception. It's easy for me, when the heat gets turned up in my life here, to start resenting the other believers around me. I think the missionary community is especially prone to personality conflicts, simply because of the kinds of people missionaries usually are. It takes a strong personality to get to the mission field in the first place. So what you end up with is a community of many chiefs and few Indians in a place where the heat is almost always turned up. No wonder the scum is always rising to the top of my heart!
I attended a Christian college, so I had the privilege of studying Psychiatric Nursing under Dr. Carolyn Carlson, an expert in the field in her own right, who taught it from a Biblical perspective. She talked a lot about Proverbs 16: 1 & 2 "Commit your ways to the Lord and your thoughts shall be established." I learned from her that the most important thing is not how we feel about someone; it's how we behave toward that person. If we don't love but we act loving, eventually our thoughts will begin to line up with our actions. I've tried and proved that principal over and over again in my life. Somehow though, it doesn't seem to get any easier.
I'm a big believer in being honest with God about how you feel. My honesty with Him is pretty blunt and brutal. If you want to be healthy, there's no room for pretending to feel something you don't. God already knows your heart anyway, so there's no point in faking it with Him. That doesn't, however, mean you need to spew everything to other people. It's better for the sake of relationships if you don't. Some things are for God's ears only. So I guess my recipe is: be honest with God; treat other people like you love them; when the pressures of life bring your heart-scum to the surface, hand over the spoon and let the Creator and sustainer of your soul skim it off and purify you.
So pray for us as we stew in the jam pot of missionary life. Ask God to keep giving us grace and humor in the face of irritations. We believe that love--the higher road--will be victorious over the status quo of resentment and bitterness. Anyone can be resentful and bitter; it takes the supernatural grace of God to make a person love his enemies.
