How to Survive Our Country This Week

What do we do with someone else’s pain?

Especially when it leads them to direct their anger towards us.

Trauma and open wounds can lead people to toss the baby out with the bathwater, but what if that baby came to save? What if we represent that baby?

Days before another election and it feels like the country’s on fire. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the pew, right?

No, that’s crazy. That’s not even close to the answer but that seems to be the choice many are making.

Desert ship. Burn the bridge. Walk away. Change your name. Renounce your affiliation. Save yourself.

Only we can’t.

Save ourselves. I mean, seriously, look at where we are.

Besides, it’s not that simple. Even if you tell yourself you’re only walking away from a name.

Change what people call you and what then? A name change only gives you an alias. It’s not really a transformation.

I’ve never known what to call myself.

Coming to Jesus in the sixties and being a teen in the seventies, I was just a Jesus girl, then a Jesus-follower once “girl” sounded like I couldn’t let go of my youth.

In my twenties, someone told me we were evangelicals. I’d never heard the word, but Rev. Graham and Rev. King were Baptist and evangelical, so that seemed okay. I like Jesus-follower better but, whatever.

I grew up in the tension between the “spread the gospel” of Graham and “the gospel spreads justice” of MLK. It made sense to me that both are true. Jesus changes everything.

But my church was Baptist in the North. I didn’t have the whole picture, really.

I wasn’t committed to any name but Jesus. Call me anything you want, I thought, but don’t call me late for potluck.

Words have a way of morphing, though, evolving with meanings that others apply.

Words for what I am are being ascribed new meaning, setting other people’s kindling ablaze, still, I’m feeling the heat.

I was disinvited from a place I’d earned my keep with the word “evangelical” thrown at me like a Molotov cocktail. Apparently, they don’t want anyone who fits that description there.

Is that what I am, though?

Seriously, still just a Jesus girl. I never signed up for a movement.

I follow an ancient Way with modern application—not a system of politics, not a club where people of color are not allowed. All are welcome, in the name of Jesus, not the name of any president or preacher or politician.

But the people who disinvited me didn’t really care to see me.

I represented something they hate right now. Whether I actually represent that or not didn’t matter.

Hate can blind a person to what is right in front of them. Fear does that, too.

Then last week, a woman posted on social media about a conference we’d both attended a few years back. She’d worshiped with the rest of us, but apparently, she experienced the worship as false.

She never was “one of them,” she said.

She stated, though, that none of us meant a word we sang. She knew that because we were white. She believes there is no hope for the “white evangelical church,” whatever that is.

No hope of repentance, forgiveness, restoration. No hope.

Complete condemnation.

And I have two thoughts at once: I meant what I was singing. I cannot fully appreciate the depths of her pain.

If I feel misunderstood in this moment, she has felt misunderstood her entire life. If I feel labeled by my color in this moment, that has been her greater experience.

I believe in generational trauma. I believe there is systemic evil perpetrated by Satan. I also believe the hope of Christ can overcome it all. But He hasn’t yet.

I can tell she doesn’t want me to bear her pain. She wants me to feel it. And then walk away.

She has disavowed any affiliation with me and my whiteness and my evangelical-ness.

And I want to be part of the solution, but I can’t walk out of my own skin.

Besides that, it’s the skin my Father chose for me so I don’t feel guilty about the color of it any more than I feel guilty for having a beating heart, one that can be broken.

I could easily ditch this evangelical title. I know many who have. Cast it off like out-of-fashion jeans or a T-shirt we’ve outgrown.

I’ve always, only, really been a Jesus-girl anyway.

But how does that help my sister (who I know doesn’t want to be my sister)? How does that serve her pain? How does that bind her wounds? How does that heal?

A Jesus-follower by any other name will still be hated and feared by some, misunderstood by others, and called to love no matter what.

I can acknowledge part of what she’s saying.

Not every white evangelical Baptist is a Jesus-person at heart.

Some have secretly embraced systemic evil and immersed themselves in hatred like a strange baptism that says Jesus doesn’t save people who don’t look like them.

Jesus said that His enemy would send wolves disguised among us sheep. I believe Him. I’ve met them.

They create havoc, but they aren’t Jesus-people. They are counterfeit sheep. But that’s the evil part because the real pain they cause has a false association with Jesus and the church.

Their evil has hurt my brothers and sisters of color. I see their pain. I won’t try to tell them how to heal.

It hurts the rest of us, too, because if one part of the body hurts, we all do.

I can hear what this woman is saying, and I can know that I meant what I was singing, and I can acknowledge her pain and I can still believe in hope for every sinner, and I can live in the tension of all these things.

So can she, if she chooses.

We don’t have to fight.

We do have to work.

We do have to speak and hear truth.

We do have to repent and weep and confront evil and renounce wolves and bind wounds and mean what we sing and keep loving people even as they walk away.

We can live in the tension of loving Jesus and sticking with His people even knowing some will prove false and we face adversaries from within and without and we need to repent daily and do hard things.

This is our calling in our days, and these are the days we’ve been given to be His people.

He chose us to represent Him in our times. We are assigned to this, and we were designed for this.

Don’t worry about the names we’re being called, worry about what He’s called us to be and ask for the power to be all that.

Love people truthfully. Speak truth lovingly.

Save your anger and energy for the forces trying to keep us apart—away from the only One who saves.

Look toward the day when all our dreams will be realized in Him.

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,  and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Revelation 7:9-10

Stop waiting for the work to get easier. It will never be easier to live the gospel of Jesus Christ than it is today.

How will we ever survive #Election2022 https://t.co/k595chbPU5 #amwriting

— Lori Roeleveld (@lorisroeleveld) November 1, 2022