Healing For The Wounded-by-Christians Heart
I grew up in a small family where everyone believed in God, but no one believed much in the church. They did, however, believe just enough to send me to a Vacation Bible School over the summer when I was 12 years old, and that is where I fell in love with the people of Jesus. After it was over, I wanted to go to church. Any church. My family always supported this desire by dropping me off before the service started and picking me up after. Very, very rarely would they ever go in. As I got older, I wondered why. Why do you say God is important, but you don’t want to go to church?
It was from this question that I first heard the statement I would hear over and over again after that: the church is full of hypocrites (never mind that it’s also hypocritical to be a Christian and not value the church, right?). Most people who make this claim have a very personal experience with the church (or with individual Christians) that has left wounds that we can’t see and that haven’t yet been healed.
I think it’s so important to realize that although you and I may not be the people who have hurt our non-Christian friends and neighbors, we might look and sound like those people enough to be “muted” by association. This, strangely, is good news, because it puts us in the perfect position to offer a humble apology and to display the congruency that is healing for the wounded-by-Christians heart.
As we step in the lives of our friends and neighbors with insides that match our outsides, we offer healing little bits at a time. The truth is that all people are hypocritical in some ways, but not all people leave behind the same trail of wreckage that Christians seem to leave. Have you ever wondered why? Maybe, just maybe, the hypocritical Christian wouldn’t leave such an impact if the world wasn’t desperate to see the genuine way of Jesus lived out. However imperfectly as it is sure to be, we’ve got some work to do.
-Heather
Heather Garrett leads Regen's Prayer Team. She and her husband Holden live in Girard with their daughter Chloe and dog Myles.
