because real Life has to be lived out

Apparently my announcement on facebook and Twitter that I needed to “begin a conversation” I’d been putting off for a while caught some people’s attention, because there was definitely a spike in visits to the blog the day after I posted that. Perhaps, too, my incomplete discussion of the concept of “Whole Gospel” caught attention, because there’s also been a spike in visits the past “in between” day or two– presumably some of you checking back to see if I’d posted any cool new heresy yet! So, here we are… I’ll jump back in. Admittedly, I’m still struggling with the same thing that kept me from beginning this discussion two months ago when I first wanted to: it’s something I feel so passionate about, and it’s something so big, I simply don’t know how to put words together to say what I want to say. But, God willing, something will end up posted here and we’ll run with it. And to start, I’ll need to talk about myself for a while.

This, as far as I can tell, is in fact the gospel presented to us in the Bible, God’s Word. And yet… I think we’re missing something. I know I was missing something until rather recently. And now I’m realizing that it was one of the most crucial pieces.

I’ve grown up in the church. I was born to Christian parents, because a Christian when I was four or five, re-became a Christian a few years later (when it meant a little more to me!), was baptized, went to a Christian college, and currently stay busy attending two churches, two Bible studies, church choir, youth group, etc. So when I recently realized I’d been missing (or misunderstanding) a part of the Christian gospel my whole life… well, needless to say, it startled me a bit.

The Christianity I knew was the one I wrote about a couple days ago (if you missed it, it’s here). Love God, be holy, let His light shine through you, be ready to explain the hope that you have. My first summer in a “real” job, I realized a huge joy in walking around the building with a big smile on my face, actually caring enough about people to ask them how they were and pause to hear their answer, and occasionally being told “You’re always so smiley… there’s something different about you…”

Now I’d better pause here and say– this gospel is NOT wrong. Not at all. In fact I couldn’t be more grateful to have been raised with an understanding of these things. God be praised! I think that, timid as I was in those days, He was able to use me to shine His light.

But the fact is we’re never “arrived”– we’re never done learning. There’s always more of this Truth thing for us to figure out, for the simple reason that it’s God’s and He’s much bigger than we’ll ever be. And so, after living the first 18 years of my life with a certain understanding of His Truth, I found myself on a path of learning and stretching I would not have expected.

The past several years, God has stretched my heart to a new understanding of this simple gospel. Letting His light shine through me means going to places other people won’t and still smiling, still caring. That’s why the Bulgarian Roma liked me… I actually cared. It also means being open to ever new and greater depths of unselfishness. To doing things that scare me to pieces, and doing them with the absolute certain trust that He’s with me. I suppose there are the makings here of a very powerful warrior for God, if it weren’t for a certain laziness I haven’t been able to shake, which makes some of those “scary things” harder to do, not because they’re scary, but because they require decision and action. But we’re working on this.

This past spring, I began to understand in brand new ways how pathetically limited was my idea of God Himself. I had Him a little too close to Zeus’s proportions, and no where near those belonging to YHWH, Creator-God-ONLY-ONE of the universe. My interactions with Him were proportionately limited and rather casual. With a revamped understanding of Him, I began to gain a new understanding of what it actually means to worship Him and live for Him and love Him. Out of these realizations, part of the idea for this blog was eventually born.

This summer, the learning continued. Thanks to the way friends sometimes share their passions with each other without even meaning to, I suddenly found that my bestie’s compassionate love for children had spread to my own heart (I’d always “loved” kids from a distance, as non-babysitter-types will, and I most definitely have been in love with my little niece since the day she was born. But compassionate love? For anyone under the age of 11? That’s new.)  That led to other little wake-ups, until one day I was at work cutting out pictures from National Geographic magazines (there was a work-related purpose, I promise), and came across a picture of little children in southeast Asia rummaging through trash heaps for metal scraps and wire that they could salvage for some pittance… and there and then I found  myself with tears in my eyes, knowing a part of me that I’d never even recognized before wouldn’t be really living until I had a personal hand in helping children like those. Out of that new-found passion, the other part of the idea for this blog was born. And out of that new-found passion, I began sponsoring a little Thai girl through Compassion International a few weeks later. And out of that new-found passion, part of my cubicle at work became dedicated to “compassion advocacy”– pictures of smiley little ones from countries across the world, all with searching, questioning eyes. Next to the pictures are powerful quotes, such as Dr. Seuss’s, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” and Patrick McDonald’s, “Why is it that a child’s death amounts to a tragedy, but the death of millions is merely a statistic?” 

In the space of a very few weeks, thanks merely to a strange transferrence of emotion from my close friend and to a profound series of changes in my heart that only God could have manufactured, I changed from being a person passionate about God, passionate about living the love and the light, passionate about following the pursuits I believe He’s placed before me (English literature as a means for teaching as a means for reaching, as well as music and writing and some other hobbies), to being that same person but with a heart consumed by compassion. Suddenly nursing homes didn’t scare me as much. Suddenly those kids left unsponsored over the sea consumed an awful lot of my emotional energy, my plans for the future, and my words. (Did I confuse a lot of friends and coworkers and family members during this time, because of the radically different focus without any explanation. Yes… yes I did. Hurray confusion!)

And suddenly the passage in James 1, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world”– a passage which I had always technically agreed with– I actually felt at a heart level and was ready to do something about. I say I had always “technically agreed with” it because I’ve always seen compassion and holiness as critical parts of the gospel. But not until this summer did the compassion aspect really sink into my brain and heart in a tangible “this is it” kind of way. Compassion, both the feeling and the action that issues from the feeling, is half of what James calls “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless.”

So far so good. A summer of great progress in the heart and head of Emily. But it wasn’t until mid September that I got the last piece (so far) of the puzzle. All my life I’d seen this compassion thing as a branch of the gospel and/or the church’s mission. Critically important, but not to be confused with the real work of the church– telling people about Christ and His salvation, and bringing them to a saving knowledge of Him (didn’t I word that so perfectly churchily?). I had been taught to be extremely wary of the so-called “social gospel,” i.e. focusing more on clothing and feeding the poor and healing the sick, etc., than on the immediate work of preaching the “repent and be saved” Good News gospel. I had been taught, too, that we SHOULD clothe and feed the poor and heal the sick, so there wasn’t a lack of love– it was just important to keep the right balance. The clothing and feeding should be done in all love and compassion and generousness,  but with the more important view in mind of bringing these people to a place where they could hear and understand the Good News.

Then, this summer, I began to better understand that notion of compassion being actually an important part of “religion that God our Father accepts…” In other words, it’s not just a branch off of the church’s work. Somehow it’s very critically a part of the church’s work, of the gospel. How exactly the parts fit together, I wasn’t certain. But I knew (and preached/wrote here!) that an impassioned, active love for the poor and broken and “least of these” ought (must) flow out of our love for God if it was truly love.

And then, in September, the puzzle pieces fell into place. On September 14th I wrote the Taking in the Bigger Picture post, ending with that line summarizing the duality of our role in the world as Christians, ” Hate the sin and deceit and filth with a consuming passion, as your God does. Love the people with a consuming compassion, as your God does… so you can’t rest until you’ve actually acted out and changed their lives.” I still say this is accurate. But I also admit– I didn’t fully understand my own words that day. It wasn’t til around September 18th that I got it. Compassion doesn’t merely flow out of our love for God as an extension of church/gospel action. It’s not our purpose as resulting from or separate from our calling. It’s not a result of the gospel. Compassion is the gospel.

For those of you currently reeling under the thought that I’m leaving the faith, let me quickly add that salvation (and justification and what I like to call “rejuvenation” and the rest of that path) is also the gospel. We are absolutely, I state without a single reservation, commissioned by Christ Himself to go into the world and tell people about Him, His sacrifical death for us, His power to free us from our broken and sinful prison-lives, and His passionate love that only waits for our acquiesance before He turns our ugliness in glory. This is the Bible’s gospel and I’m proud to preach it.

And…

Compassion is also the Bible’s gospel. It is God’s heart made manifest on earth. It is also, I state again without a single reservation, what He has commissioned us for.

Don’t worry, I have Scripture and lots of thinking to back this up. But… you knew it was coming… not tonight! It’s time for us all to sleep, and me to work on some of the other things He’s got in front of me right now. And then we’ll return to this oh-so-delightful topic.