When Saul was confronted by Jesus on the road to Damascus, Jesus did not say, “Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?” He did not say, “Saul, why are you persecuting the people under my command?” He said, “Saul, why do you persecute Me?”
When someone hits us, we say, “Don’t hit me!” We don’t say, “Do not hit the arm under my command.” We feel hit; we feel pain. We do not sense ourselves as separate from our bodies.
When we persecute the Body of Christ, we persecute Christ. When we tear down the Body of Christ, we do this to Christ as well. He has chosen to be united with His church, to be the Head of the Body.
I’m a preacher’s kid. I’ve seen the dark underbelly of the church. I have the battle scars to prove that we as Christians shoot our wounded. I’ve fired more than a few rounds myself. I have good reason to be wary of fellow Christians, to be reluctant to fully commit myself to a local expression of the Body of Christ. My problem is not with Jesus; it’s with some of His followers.
Or so I tell myself.
The sad truth is that I do not love the Body of Christ as I should. And there is only one possible explanation for this coldness in my heart. It is because I do not have enough love for the Head. God forgive me.
May I love Jesus more. May I love all of Him, with all of my heart, mind, soul, strength. May I love Him passionately and zealously. May I love Him with a broken and contrite heart. May I love Him in purity and holiness. And then I will love His Body as I should.
My understanding of ecclesiology has gone through a number of changes in these past 20 years. But these words I wrote back then still challenge and convict me.
While visiting a Lutheran church yesterday, and feeling far more connected to historic Christianity than I do in my Baptist church, it struck me that perhaps modern evangelicalism is inherently at risk of following every fad and wind of doctrine by our very rejection of centuries of Protestant tradition, creeds, liturgy, and means of worship. We have set ourselves up to be our own interpreters of Scripture, to seek after “freshness” and “relevance”, and to look with disdain at what is timeless. It is as if we need to be consantly reinventing the wheel in how we “do church”.
And, frankly, it strikes me as more than a bit arrogant.
How thankful I am to have been in church services where I have had the privilege of praying the same prayers, reciting the same creeds, and singing the same hymns as other believers the world over… for centuries. It is both humbling and glorious to experience this deeper connection to the Body of Christ. How different from the attitude within much of modern evanglicalism that criticizes liturgy as being “stale” and “rote”, that scorns anything from a previous generation, and that wants desperately to be “cutting edge”.
A lot has happened in those two decades. A lot. My faith journey has taken twists and turns I never could have predicted. I was both surprised and amused to re-read this recently, and felt like telling my younger self: WOW, Rebecca. You made some good points but you didn’t go far enough.
I recently stumbled upon a blog post I wrote about vaccines way back in 2015. From today’s perspective, those former debates seem downright docile and friendly.
That was pre-COVID, of course. For those who have forgotten, that was before people announced their vaccination status on Facebook, before people began their Christmas letters telling you that they were double-vaccinated and boosted (as if that was the most important event of 2021) before I saw a fully vaccinated and boosted medical doctor fly into a panic because she came within six feet of a healthy double-masked unvaccinated person, before I heard people advocating loudly against informed consent, parental rights, medical freedom, and medical privacy.
Fear is powerful. Now this nostalgic read makes me chuckle and long for the good old days. Things seemed so much simpler back then.
On this Easter Monday, while praying for someone who recently experienced the devastating loss of a loved one, I was reminded of words I wrote back in 1990, to be published in a church devotional booklet:
Easter…it has held a new, triumphant meaning for me since I discovered that you can’t really celebrate the victory of Easter without being devastated by Good Friday; one is meaningless without the other. When I was 19 years old, my beloved Opa died, my mother’s father, a man who had completely opened his heart to me and captured mine in the process. Even when he was a continent away, I felt his love.
A brutal, painful heart attack took his life not long after he had celebrated his fiftieth wedding anniversary. My mother, who had the privilege of being with him when he went home, told me his last words were a prayer of praise, ending, “Jesus is the victor! Hallelujah! Amen.”
Grief is far more than emotional. It is a pain so intense that it is physical, devastating, exhausting, all consuming.
Easter came in the early days of our grieving. My mother and I stood together in church, singing the familiar Easter hymns, tears flowing down our faces. It was then that Easter became real to me — truly real — dynamic and immediate rather than historic. I was amazed that my heart could be simultaneously filled with such great joy and such aching sorrow.
Someday I too will be snatched out of this life. Someday I will stand before my Savior, along with all the saints who have gone before, and I will shout with my Opa, “Jesus is the victor! Hallelujah! Amen.”
She was 7 years old, skinny, often unkempt, a wild little thing who screamed like a banshee, knew cuss words no little girl should know, and was quite the disruptive influence at the church school her grandparents paid for her to attend.
Somehow she stole my heart. I was 19 or 20, still young and idealistic, and I had not yet outgrown my childhood notion that love was enough to heal and fix anything. She was as drawn to me, a childcare worker at the school, as I was to her. At first she called me “Teacher”. Then she broke my heart by calling me “Mommy”.
Her mother, a single mom and an alcoholic, bought her a Raggedy Andy doll so that Tina could, as she claimed her mother told her, “also have a man in her bed at night”. She told me of what sounded like a steady stream of men in her mother’s bed, about fixing her own suppers, and about getting herself ready for school in the morning.
No matter how early I arrived to open up the church before morning day care started at 7:00am, it seemed that Tina would be waiting for me alone on the playground, underdressed for the weather, blonde hair all a mess, her thin little arms wrapped around herself, shivering. I would bundle her in my sweatshirt and hold her in my lap until she warmed up. It was one of those times that she started calling me “Mommy”.
She was impossible. She defied rules, tested boundaries, threw temper fits, fought with other children, and cussed like a little sailor. But she also sang the cutest rendition of both parts of Donnie and Marie’s signature duet that I’ve ever heard. And she craved affection and attention so desperately that it was painful to watch.
One day she flipped out when one of the school dads got playful with her. She shrieked, “Don’t molest me!!” and it scared him so much that he avoided her like the plague after that. I tried not to think about possible reasons for her reaction.
She was a bad influence on my little brother, and on a number of the other children. If she wasn’t clinging to me, I had to watch her like a hawk. She was a troubled little soul, desperately screaming for help.
One day she asked me if she could live with me, if I could be her mommy for real. I presented my case to my parents. In my naïveté, I actually thought I could ask her mother — who obviously didn’t want her — to give Tina to me, and I could raise her and love her to wholeness. Surely, despite my flaws and my youth, I would be a far better mother. We would live together in the “little house” behind the parsonage, and I would make sure she would not impose a burden on anyone else.
To me, she was worth turning my life upside down and backwards, worth giving up any hope of a “normal” future. How could I not do everything in my power to help her, to give her a better life, to rescue her, to save her?
I hated it when my mother would respond to my idealistic ideas with, “It’s not that simple.” This time I really hated it, because she was right.
And then Tina was kicked out of school. I marched into the principal’s office and demanded, pleaded, advocated, begged, guilted, quoted Scripture…you name it, I did it. How could we abandon Tina? Wasn’t she the sort of child who needed this school the most? The grandparents had sacrificed, skimping together money they didn’t have, in a desperate attempt to provide help for their little, troubled granddaughter — and we were tossing her out on her ear? I was eloquent and convincing…well, to my ears anyway. Everyone else seemed relieved to be free of the numerous ongoing and escalating behavior problems that were disrupting the other students. “We can’t sacrifice all the other students for one child,” the principal told me. “Why not?” I had the audacity to reply. “She needs us much more than they do.”
Just like that, Tina was out of my life. I never got to say goodbye, never saw or heard from her again. We had failed her. I was both angry and grieved.
The girl in this heartbreaking video reminded me of Tina…something about parts of her story, the way she looks and her outbursts of anger.
Tina impacted me more than she will ever know. I have no idea what became of her…if she’s still alive…if she even remembers me…I hope that she remembers that someone once loved her and believed in her, and thought she was worth rescuing. More than that, I hope that someone did in fact rescue her.
I hope her story had a happy, hopeful ending, her own version of this one:
Prone to wander... 