A friend of mine in West Virginia recently offered up the following testimony:
So i noticed something today about temptation. On days that i dont really get into prayer, or just read some of the bible basically just so i can say i read for the day, and also when i stay to myself and don't really interact with people, ive found that im more susceptible to sin and temptation. Today ive prayed throughout the day, also prayed for others, witnessed to people and just prayed with others and brought the name of Jesus to peoples attention, ive realized that temptation wasnt as strong. When we witness and step out in Jesus name, thats where we get our strength. People want to pray as a last resort, but we need to put our relationship with God first. Im preaching to myself as well. Our Lord is a good Father. This year i have gained so much wisdom and knowledge through his Holy spirit, and the word of God. i still have a long way to go, for instance there are times i feel i havent learned anything and thats when the Lord will minister to me, and showing me that ive learned more than what i think i have. I wanna stay plyable, and always ready to learn more about our Savior. I know sometimes people get tired of me talking about Jesus and sometimes they might think im acting high and mighty which isnt my intentions. I just want others to know his goodness, and his mercy and grace. Also want others to know him the way i am coming to know him. I love yall i pray this helps someone in Jesus name.This is real talk, and its sincere and comes from a place of great struggle and growth.
Now, no one should confuse me with being any kind of spiritual person or any kind of counsellor, but I want to offer up a few points in reaction to this testimony.
It's a true story that if you're trying to do any kind of internal work, including the work of repentance and salvation, that you're going to face incredible difficulties if you try to do it alone. Even monks most often do their work in preparation to reenter the world or do their work in communities. Our brother has his finger on the pulse here.
I get what our brother is saying about prayer coming first, not last, and I will offer that we need to somehow find the balance between prayer and good works and then turn each into the other. What I mean is that prayer could or should be a good work or deed and that the work that we do with others to uplift them can or should be prayers. Doing something prayerfully is a step towards that, but why don't we push it more often and go further?
In the book Raising Lazarus there is an especially moving and real scene in which someone is trying to help someone living in a homeless camp in West Virginia who has a substance abuse disorder problem and has a badly infected feet and is about to get rousted by the police. The person washing the houseless person's feet and trying to assist them was so involved in that work that it became a prayer, I think. The line separating our best desires that lead to justice and peace and wholeness, on the one hand, and holiness, liberation, and salvation on the other are more fluid than we think.
Most Christians will pray for a person and for easing or a solution to whatever difficulties that person is facing at a particular moment. Perhaps we get this wrong. It may be more meaningful and helpful to pray for the person, take the basic affirmative actions with them to help them get their life together, try to see that person in the contexts of their history and their family's histories, try to meet their basic needs without enabling their difficulties and disempowering them, make this about values and prayer and action, and build movements to make life for all of us easier.
It sometimes feels to me as if the "thoughts and prayers" messages we send out and praying for specific solutions to what we think are root problems is either manipulative or sentimental. We don't intend this to be so, but in the United States we have a Christianity that often holds to manipulation and sentimentality even as the churches empty out.
Our brother speaks for so many of us when he says "i still have a long way to go, for instance there are times i feel i havent learned anything and thats when the Lord will minister to me, and showing me that ive learned more than what i think i have." I think that about every person who is open to salvation feels this. When someone says this out loud the common response from many believers is to tell the person to pray for wisdom and strength. I think that that's good advice as far as it goes, but someone should be offering an embrace and assuring people who are seeking something in spirituality or religion that they're better and smarter and more creative than they probably think they are and encourage people to start with the small things. The theologian Richard Rohr suggests that people learn to love a common object or being---a rock or a tree or a pet, for instance---before they try to love God.
We live in a world where love is distorted. We're told to love God, but our ideas of love come from Hollywood or are sentimental and so it is no mystery why people feel that they are failing to love and to know God. We're not going to fit God into anything, much less into our ideas of love that come from corporations and romance novels. We're told to think of God as Father, but so many people have never known a real loving father, or they never had a functional family and cannot grasp what God as Father really means. We set impossible goals for ourselves and one another and we crash. Most of us need to start with the small things and build from there.
The familiar point that God is love goes over most of our heads, and its an arguable formulation anyway, but there are enough good people around who testify that they found total love and acceptance and forgiveness in God and their testimony is mostly beyond question. Two points come to me from this. First, that we should not be quick to tell people who live different lives than we do that God doesn't love them, or that God may love them but certainly hates whatever sins we think they're committing. Be ready to accept the testimony of others and watch over time how that testimony plays out. Second, love has hidden and personal qualities---its intimate by definition---so we have to look for ways to publicly acknowledge God's love and God's working within us and amongst us. For me this means understanding social justice as the public evidence of God and God's love. I hope that you agree with me on this.
I think that one of the biggest walls we face when we want to find God's "goodness, and his mercy and grace" and share this with others is generational trauma. We pray and study with the thought that our relationship with Jesus Christ is only personal in the first place. But I want to offer up that our salvation depends on so much else. We come to our moments of prayer and good works as human beings with family and social histories and these have to be addressed, and especially so when these are the flashpoints for our pain.
Our brother's testimony above stands by itself, and nothing that I'm saying is intended to be critical. He's teaching us something. Every voice matters. Please listen up.
