The other day I was driving down the road in the lovely suburbs of Arvada and I felt like someone kicked me in the stomach. An old van pulled into the lane in front of me. It took a minute for my eyes to focus on how weird it looked. Then I got a little closer and realized that huge posters of aborted fetuses were plastered on all sides of the van. They were graphic, horrific, and personally painful. Underneath the photographs were mean and disparaging words about baby killers and God’s wrath. Honestly, the ugliness, the meanness was so shocking that I had to abruptly get off my telephone call and catch my breath. It took me a few minutes to regroup, awestruck by the insensitivity of the images. I can understand the point trying to be made, but why do it this way? In that moment, I was truly embarrassed that I would be associated with this kind of “Christian”.
Lately I have been feeling that quite a bit. In recent conversations, I have been hearing a recurring theme–mistreatment by Christians. Pain caused by insensitive Christians and mean churches. Many have witnessed a huge disparity between what is said and what is done. We know that Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but Christianity has become known in this country as the least likely help to help those with whom they disagree. Gays, liberals, evolutionists, and others perceived to have a world view other than Christian have often felt the wrath, not the benevolence, of those called Christian. Rejected instead of embraced, shamed instead of loved, ignored instead of helped is the pattern. In this past year I have become one of those people—those “wounded by the church.” Take it from me, to challenge the established, large institutional church to value kindness over growth is a sure way to unemployment. The pain is deeper than I ever could have imagined but I can tell you that thanks to the kindness of my dear and faithful friends at the Refuge and other kind Christians these wounds are healing.
This past week I was at a conference in Seattle. It was a wild gathering of radicals who believe in a different way of doing church—a simpler way more focused on what Jesus cared about–the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized. But instead of slick programming, bells, whistles & buildings the higher value is kindness. I have believed the things that they were talking about for a long time but because I was so caught up in the megachurch and all its trappings I didn’t know this crazy underground movement of simply kind Christ followers existed. I felt privileged to sit next to such dedicated people….kind, gentle leaders who didn’t care about big salaries and filling cavernous auditoriums but truly cared about tangibly loving the abused, the beaten, the broken.
In the spirit of becoming more and more like Jesus in this broken messed up world, one of the speakers shared this profound thought: Being kind is more important than being right. These words stung. How often has being right been my primary objective? I have stood on tables, shook my fists, hurt other people, all in the spirit of “being right.” And hey, let’s face it, sometimes I have had a pretty darn good point and the right to feel right. But where did it get me, really? Nowhere except maybe closer to anger, resentment, isolation, unforgiveness. I have found the need to be right to be a dead-end, a lose-lose.
I want to learn to be more kind. I want to extend to my enemies, and those who don’t agree with me, forgiveness and compassion instead of hate and anger. I want to live my life well instead of worrying about how others are living theirs. I want to continually stay in touch with Christ’s radical kindness, mercy and compassion toward me (even when I don’t really understand it) and offer it freely to others. And I guess I keep wondering—why is this so hard to do? Why is bitterness, self-righteousness so much easier for me? I am pretty sure it’s just because I am a human being and inclined toward a hard, self-protective heart instead of a soft and vulnerable one. And bottom line is that extending kindness makes me vulnerable, and I hate to be vulnerable. It’s so scary, risky. But I’ve been imagining how different my world might be if I was a little bit more kind and a little less worried about being right. What if we all were a little kinder to ourselves, kinder to others?
My friend K-Lee has a wonderful tag line on her email…”Be kinder than necessary. Everyone is fighting some kind of battle.” God, help me, help our little community of rag-tags at The Refuge be known for our kindness.
This is so true. I’ve spent my whole life focused on being “right” - whether it was good grades in school, justice rants (teenage years), unsolicited advice. I even had a sales consultant for my business tell me I had a problem with being “right”.
And somewhere between teenage justice and adulthood I lost my kindness. It slipped right by me because I have lots of compassion, and I confused it with kindness.
I didn’t even miss it til my kids, my sister, and my husband made we aware of it in the last couple of years. That’s what family’s for - thank God for them.
So now I am embarking on a return to kindness and a relearning of kindness. Thanks Kathy for this timely and spot on posting!
Hm. I don’t know that I agree. I don’t think it’s the case of one “trumping” the other. I think BEING right is unfathomably important - but I don’t think that being right necessarily means that you must browbeat others into accepting what you say. In Ephesians we are told to “speak the truth in love.”
It is possible not only to be right-but-unkind, but also to be so focused on kindness that we do not stand up for what is right. Either extreme is a failure.
kathy,
i hope this helps all of us since we have ALL had moments that made us feel this way. i also hope that my comment touches on all portions of this post: your feelings and being kind!
these types of christians are what have kept me away from Jesus for so long! as i was reading your post a thought came to my mind… how would the pastor of that church feel if we knew his deepest, darkest secret and posted pictures of that on our vehicles. now i know that that comment is geared towards revenge which is not what christians are supposed to be about but that is the thought that crossed my mind.
The second thing that I thought once I realized revenge wasn’t the answer was “what should have been on the side of that van instead”? And then it hit me like a ton of bricks! A few months ago at our house of refuge we were watching a video that described a moment in jesus’ life. The passage that we were discussing was Luke 7:36-50 and it reads like this:
Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”
Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me, teacher,” he said.
“Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii,[a] and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
So I think a better sign to have on this van would be an illustration of this moment followed by the verse. This shows how jesus felt about kindness and faithfulness. Jesus new her sins and loved her in spite of them. He wanted us to be KIND, forgiving, and loving; not judgmental. That is what Christianity is supposed to look like and be about.
Kathy and others: whenever people (especially other Christians) question your right to be a Christian or make your question your right, PLEASE think of this passage. We all sin, but jesus loves us in spite of that. In this situation I think he would want us to not question our Christianity but to be a true Christian and forgive that church and pray for them that they may run across this verse and re-think what they are saying.
Something that is coming back around in American Justice is the “eye for an eye” concept. The concept today resembles revenge and retaliation more than a justice model. I’ve thought about WWJD and why people these days are screaming for justice and what it has to do with the church. Here is what I’ve come up with. (So that nobody says I am trying to be “right” I will confess that I have had an abortion and I will use another example to make my point.) Someone at another time and another place messed by in ministry (what doesn’t matter there are a million sins). Now the church preached their usual “forgiveness” presentation. The church did everything they could for the “fallen” sister. I became angrier and angrier inside until relationships were torn apart over it. Oh, it wasn’t that I couldn’t grasp the “forgiveness” concept, it wasn’t that this was the sin I found unforgivable, so what was it? Nobody thought the people that had been hurt needed help because we weren’t the “sinner” (in this situation only). There are only programs when you mess up! There was no counseling offered for those offended (only the offender), no announcements that we would all be meeting and discussing what she had done (her feelings might have been hurt). Kindness that is one sided ends up looking more like favoritism and Jesus didn’t play favorites. I say all this not to be unkind but to give a wakeup call. I am afraid if we don’t start helping the victims of crime, they are going to start demanding an “eye for an eye”.
kathh
I found this paragraph and I thought it addressed the motivaton of kindness well. We have only one of two options. “Either we can devote outselves and our time and our energy to demonstrating the ugliness of and futility of sin and the world, hoping that such will enbolden our hearts to say NO to it as unworthy of our affection, or we can demonstrate the beauty and splendor of all that God is for us in Jesus and become happily and joyfully enticed by a rival affection.”