Brokenness is everywhere. The question isn't why is there brokenness anymore (a.k.a. the fall of man); the question is why am I not broken for it? However, as of late, I feel the Lord breaking my heart over so many things that are breaking His heart. Most recently over the darkness of addiction. Working at The Next Door for the past few months I have seen many women come and go through those doors. However, as I am beginning to invest in these women, feel for these women, and love these women as restored artwork of the Lord, I feel the weight of the pain, the shame, the stress, the yearning to live a life like Christ that they are bearing. I thank the Lord that He has already bore the burden of their addictions on the cross, but I cannot help but constantly pray for them and continued restoration for them.
Lord, help me to release these women to you. Help me to recognize the power of your love in their life and the depth of your love for their life. Lord, I pray that my emotions would not dictate my theology right now because, frankly, I don't see a lot of hope. Thank you for not calling me to save people, but to love people. You do not promise that success will look like we plan. In fact, You promise the exact opposite. You promise us that we will face persecution, we will be rejected, we will not be understood by the world.
The Lord says to "seek the SHALOM of the city in which [He] have sent [us] into exile" (Jeremiah 29:7). Shalom is often translated as "peace," but Nicholas Wolterstorff defines it as being "the state of flourishing in all dimensions of one's existence: in one's relation to God, in one's relation to one's fellow human being, in one's relation to nature, in one's relation to one's self." To the best of my understanding this means that the Lord wants me to see to it that I and the people around me (in the city in which He has placed me) flourish in our relationships with the Lord, each other, nature and ourselves. He doesn't just call us to seek the peace of the people in the city with whom we agree, but the city as a whole.
The public school system. The homeless population. The immigrant (both documented and undocumented). The families on food stamps and welfare. The businessmen and women. The young professionals. The ministries. The local business owners. The farmers. The construction workers. All of which embody the city in which I live. If any of them are not flourishing, we should be praying and seeking earnestly that God will make a way for us to help it flourish or provide someone or some way for them to thrive in peace.
What are some things keeping us from seeing shalom of our cities being a reality?
Schools spend more money on sports than on books for classes or other extra-curricular activities, such as the arts. Our government is tearing down housing projects to provide a safer environment but they are not providing alternatives for people that were there before. This is pushing people out of their communities they have already established, and into other people’s communities (this is causing turf wars in some areas and the suburbs now have more pockets of poverty and crime than ever before). The current immigration laws that are in place make it near impossible for many immigrants to gain citizenship and often keep their families in lower economic statuses.
The root of each of these issues is, of course, sin.
Gary Haugen said, “questions about suffering in the world are not so much questions about God’s character but as questions about the obedience and faith of God’s people.” If sin is disobedience to God and His law, then this proves that sin is what leads to injustice. Which means to start seeking justice is to repent of our apathy and to begin to care. Once we repent, God can remove the scales from our eyes and we can begin to see people and the city in which we live with different lens. Unable to step back into our old way of thinking, believing, seeing.
However, I must confess I have not done much to seek the shalom of Nashville. What has kept me from living a life actively pursuing justice? Fear. Not of the people I serve. No. I have no trouble making friends with people of different social status or race than me. What I do fear is letting the ones I am serving fully into my life. I keep them at a distance, because secretly (or not so secretly) I do not feel like we were on the same page. I do not want to look into how they got there, because then I might be asked to DO something about it without actually seeing a change for YEARS. This is something that is very frustrating for me. When I shared dinner with my houseless friends, I made sure I could call them by name, but did not dare to ask them how they got there or why they are still there? I am afraid of offending them, making them feel like I see them as different than me, but most of all I fear God calling me to actually get down and dirty with them to get to the root of the problem and sit with them and work with them to fix it. Ouch!
Lord, I want to be made new. Selfishly I want to continue to respond to injustice by “paving over it” or making friends with people different than me because I know I can see results and I do not have to think about what happens after I leave. I know You are constantly changing my world-view to look more like Yours and I pray for a desire to go beyond recognizing the need and the root of the need, and on to being strategic in how You can use me to uproot the dead trees in order to plant new oaks of righteousness.
