In my quest to find a new church home, I tried out a new church last Sunday. It was all right; they had the usual three praise songs followed by prayer, sermon, offering, and another song to lead us out. The congregation recited no creed and there was no specific doctrine integrated into the service, which bothered my Calvinist heart a little, but not enough to stop me from going back again.
Something else bothered me more deeply than the lack of creed. The prayer after the praise songs was a piece of text they put up on the projector screens. We were told to read the text and then pray for someone we know who is hurting. The text asked us to think of someone who was unemployed or trying to conceive or abused or serving overseas or whatever. The list went on. This was all fine and good, except for the subtext. As presented by the worship leader, this prayer referred to people who were not present at the service I attended. As an afterthought, he added that some of us might also be facing some of these trials. But we weren’t supposed to assume anyone sitting on those pews was hurting; we were to reach beyond the sanctuary to someone not there.
In a church dedicated to winning souls to Christ, I am happy to pray for people not in attendance. But the implication that the people already at church don’t have problems—or that those who do are the minority—really bothered me.
As humans, we are broken. We hurt. We bleed. We cry. It is in our very nature to inflict pain on others and to feel pain from others. That’s why Jesus had to come and spill his blood for us—because we spill our own and each other’s every day, if not literally, then metaphorically.
Just like the worship leader seemed to think, I used to think my life was fine and that only other people hurt. That was before my parents told me the extent of their childhood abuse and before I realized the tension I had grown up under and before I realized that the smile on my face wasn’t always genuine. It was during the period of my life when I, like Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, was allergic to the full range of human emotion. I thought I was okay, but I wasn’t.
There’s a great line in The Thomas Crown Affair where Denis Leary says to Rene Russo, “I was okay once. I found out my wife was cheating on me. I beat a suspect unconscious…and drove my car the wrong way on an off-ramp. But I was okay” [edited to remove vulgarity]. A lot of us are telling ourselves we’re okay, but it’s not possible to be 100% okay this side of heaven. It is, however, possible to work toward being okay. Jesus tells us to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done, and John 8:32 tells us that the truth will set us free.
I believe it is God’s will for each of his children to be freed of the hurts they feel, even the ones we’ve hidden away deep inside. Of course we should pray for other people. Of course we should keep a good sense of context. One American person’s pain over divorce should not be compared to one Sudanese person’s pain over losing family members to genocide. They are different sorts of pain. Don’t compare apples and oranges. But don’t deny your own pain—that’s not going to help anyone. Face it, offer it up to God, do the hard work of letting it go. Only then can we each move on from whatever has sullied us in the past. Only then can we live in freedom.
Cheryl I can not express how happy I am that you have strengthened your relationship wih the Lord. I agree a hundred percent. We all hurt and we all make mistakes and Jesus came to take away as well as always stay by our sides. There are so many different types of hurt and pain which no one can say that you do not deserve to cry or that your pain is not as bad as theirs. We all go through different struggles and I believe some people can help others because they have been through similar times and maybe that is the reason we go through them, to help others in the future.