Follow The Leader

I was talking to someone yesterday about a situation she was dealing with, and I gave her some advice that I realized later, after I got home, was advice I needed to listen to for myself. God does that to me a lot. He’ll give me a word for someone else that I need to hear, or He’ll have me talking to someone and trying to be helpful with something they’re dealing with, and it turns out I’m dealing with the same thing. Sometimes it’s something that’s ongoing and I don’t make the connection until later, and sometimes something happens right after, or maybe a day or even a week after I’ve been talking to someone, and I find myself right in the middle of the same situation I was talking to someone else about.

There is nothing better than God’s wisdom, even if sometimes it makes me go, “Ouch!” when I get hit with a dose of self-recognition of my own very human condition. There are times when the Lord will speak to me with such love and caring, but then there are times that mixed with that love are words of truth about something that I am doing wrong that I need to hear. It’s very easy to say that the word of correction He’s giving me is for someone else, but I’ve learned that no matter what that word is, it’s always for me too. I can't take the speck out of someone else's eye without removing the plank from my own first (Matthew 7:5).

Correction is a word that we don’t like to hear – the idea of it brings to my mind an English school master from the time of Charles Dickens or the Bronte’s, Jane Eyre’s mean Aunt, David Copperfield’s horrible step-father. But correction from God isn’t like that at all. It’s painful at times because none of us likes to admit that we might be wrong, or might have been wrong - it’s much easier to sweep our mistakes under the carpet. And God will let us do that if we want to – He always gives us the choice. But I’ve learned it’s so much nicer when I’ve messed up and He’s shown me how, to make it right again and be able to come back home to Him. There's always so much love with God, and there's so much more he can pour out on us when we can admit our mistakes and ask for His help in doing better.

Last summer I did something that I thought was right at the time, but it turned out that I was following someone’s lead and the person I was following was dead wrong. The person I was following says they’re a Christian, but that’s no excuse either – Adam was just as guilty as Eve, even though he tried to say the woman gave the apple to him. He had the choice to eat it or not and he decided it looked delicious and took a big bite. What I did ended up being harmful to someone else’s feelings, when I should have been being supportive. I allowed myself to be led into a situation where when I had power over someone I used it in a destructive way. I didn’t see it that way at the time at all. I thought I was doing the right thing. I had caught someone doing something they shouldn’t have been doing, I was right and they were wrong, and I called them on it publicly. It was only many months later, in the early part of this year, that I started to understand that there was a very different choice that I could have made. I could have chosen to be compassionate, I could have chosen to be loving, I could have chosen to speak the truth, but to speak it with love.

I had the opportunity to right that wrong over the past two days, and it was the easiest thing to do. It also opened up a place in my heart that had gotten calloused over, the place that allowed me to look at someone else in judgment and disdain. During all of this I found myself giving advice to someone else who has been dealing with a situation where she was being judged and treated with disdain, and I realized after I had spoken with her that the situation I have been dealing with over these past months with another person is the same. It’s interesting too, because the person who led me down the wrong path and encouraged me to judge and not have mercy is the same person who has been treating me spitefully for the past few months. It took my being treated like trash to help me understand that I never wanted to do that same thing to anyone else ever again.

Sometimes the Lord will open our eyes to something that we haven’t seen in someone and we’ll feel really idiotic that we never saw that thing before. When this person I know started treating me like trash, I realized that she’d done that same thing to other people I knew also. I realized that every time she’d told me that it was someone else who was doing something terrible, maybe they were or maybe they weren't, but whatever they were doing, she was doing something even worse because she would use her power over people to hurt them and not help them. We always have the choice. It doesn’t matter what the other person is doing, we always have the choice in what we are doing and how we will respond. We can treat other people with respect and love or not, it’s really as simple as that.

But in the heat of things it’s very often not that simple. When we are feeling threatened, or when we are under stress, when we are trying to prove to our boss that we are doing a great job, when we are trying to prove that we’re in charge, anything that threatens to throw us off balance can make us turn into power monsters, craving more and more power and mowing down anyone who stands in our way to our own delusion of greatness. We justify and keep telling ourselves and everyone else we’re right, and the other person necessarily has to become completely wrong – awful, the worst, despicable. If they’re not so awful, then why would we need to treat them so terribly? In the heat of things we can find ourselves listening to whatever voices justify our self-righteous behavior, and we can find ourselves walking very far away from God.

In Jeremiah 29 and 30, the Lord speaks to Israel about their unfaithfulness, and about the punishment He is bringing on them because of it. He is sending them into captivity in Babylon for 70 years and He's very clear why, but it’s a very beautiful thing that He says in Jeremiah 29:10-14, “This is what the Lord says: ‘When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  Then you will call on me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back from captivity.” And then in Jeremiah 30:10-11, we have this, “So do not be afraid, Jacob, my servant; do not be dismayed Israel,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will surely save you out of a distant place, your descendants from the land of their exile. Jacob will again have peace and security, and no one will make him afraid. I am with you and will save you,’ declares the Lord.” What beautiful words of hope and promise for a people who have done so much evil that the Lord has become angry with them! How can I even think that I have the right to judge anyone else when the Lord shows so much mercy even as He brings correction, when I know how much mercy He has given me?

God is the only one who can judge anyone, because He is the one who knows all hearts. Psalm 139:1-4 tells us, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely.” The Psalm ends with these words in verses 23-24, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

God knows all hearts. He knows mine, He knows yours, He knows the heart of whoever it is that you are dealing with in whatever struggle you are dealing with them in. Our job is not to judge – He’s the only one who can do that – our job is to ask Him to search our hearts and help us to walk in the right way no matter which way anyone else is going.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan