Dealing with Those Troubled People

People are trouble. People are troubling. People are troubled. If you are like me, each of these statements elicits a different emotional response.

A series of books on my shelf have titles like these: Surviving Difficult Church Members, Getting Along with People Who Don’t Get Along, Coping with Difficult People, Well-Intentioned Dragons. These have been around for years. Books with similar titles on the same subject have multiplied exponentially. How do we come to see people not as problems but as individuals who have problems?

Jesus saw the crowds as individuals with challenges they could not face alone. They needed help. Their major problem was their inherent weakness and inability to deal with all that life was dumping on them. His response was one of compassion.

Mat 9:35-36 And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Every individual was made in the image of God and thus had an innate value that could not be changed by circumstances or personal decisions. Every individual was loved by God and had the potential for a loving relationship with him. When that did not occur, the Lord was grieved and the individual was the loser.

Jesus put up with all kinds of people. For some he had compassion. He healed them or he confronted them. In conversation with the troubled he told them they had a problem which they had to face and make a decision. He couldn’t make it for them. In all these cases Jesus still loved the individual and was willing to show that love.

In other cases, however, Jesus loved the individual, but he did not hesitate to show his anger for their attitudes. He was angry at Pharisees and synagogue leaders who thought remembering Sabbath laws was more important than showing compassion. He was angry with his disciples who placed convenience and order above showing compassion to children. He was angry at temple rulers who placed making money above keeping the House of God a House of Prayer.

In the eyes of Jesus these people were not a problem. They had a problem. They had sold out to the life patterns and priorities of the world. In doing so they were destroying the opportunity for God’s love to be revealed in the world through them.

Jesus told a parable we have come to know as the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). As the story unfolds, we see that every individual in the story has a problem/concern. The thieves are motivated by greed. The victim is motivated by his circumstances. The priest and Levite are motivated by self-righteousness. The Samaritan is motivated by mercy and compassion for the victim.

As Jesus concludes the story, he asks his questioner for his insight.

Luk 10:36-37 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go, and do likewise."

As individuals we will always face people who make life inconvenient for us. They will impose on us. They will ask for our time, our attention, and lots of other things. They will irritate us. They will demand our approval of and our conformity to their ideas.

Jesus told his followers to be willing to show compassion. Troubled people are as sheep without a shepherd trying to make it through life under their own power and in their own wisdom, doomed to failure. They don’t know which way to turn because they have no guide to point them in the right direction. We must be willing to show compassion and mercy. What they may deserve is neither of any consequence nor our primary concern. That is why Jesus rightfully bears the title, Prince of Peace.

I Have Spiritual ADD

It's confession time. I have Attention Deficit Disorder. I have never seen a doctor about it. I have never been diagnosed with it. I have never had anyone stand up and accuse me of ruining a project because they discerned that was the critical problem. No, this is a matter of self-diagnosis.

Recently High Point University hosted Malcolm Gladwell on their campus for a series of lectures and discussions. Gladwell has written four books and is currently on his fifth. They are Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. I have read the first three and hope soon to begin on the fourth. They are an excellent read, all non-fiction.

Enough of the commercial for Gladwell's books. In an on-stage discussion, Gladwell made the comment that his father, a mathematics professor, was not a driven man putting in eighteen hour work days. Rather he was a focused man who made the most of every minute he was involved in a project. He might work two hours, take a brief break, work two more hours, and then take another break. During those two hour sessions, not even screaming in his ear could destroy his concentration. He was focused.

Oh, to be so gifted! A car drives by on the highway outside my office and I get distracted. I hear the phone ring in my administrative assistant's office and I get distracted. My mind wanders to my calendar suddenly, and I wonder if I have forgotten an appointment or a phone call I was to have made. I have no focus!

This holds just as true for my spiritual life as for my office work. I call it PADD, Prayer Attention Deficit Disorder. I know I am not alone in this having heard other people's confessions on the subject, but it's still my problem. The world has a way of distracting me from focusing upon deepening my relationhsip with God. The aching in the soul gets lost in the growling of the belly. I lose focus.

Jesus had a word of encouragement for those seeking focus that's recorded in the sixth chapter of Matthew, verse 33, "As a priority desire to possess His Kingdom and His righteousness..." (my translation) The Kingdom of God was the favorite topic of Jesus in his preaching. When he said that obtaining it was to be THE priority in the life of one of his followers, he was not only teaching it, he was also living it. Focusing upon the Kingdom of God was to be the priority for every believer.

Focusing upon the Kingdom must be the priority of every believer and every church and every association of churches as they seek to be faithful in their obedience to their divine calling. Nothing can become more important than living out the priorities of the Kingdom of God. Its nature and calling must be at the heart of every proclamation, shape every effort of ministry, and become the goal of every spiritual seeker. To be distracted from this is to lose sight of why Jesus came, died, and was raised from the dead.

The individual believer focuses upon living out the Kingdom in this world by living out the two Great Commandments (Matthew 22). The local church focuses upon living out the Kingdom by using its resources to make the love of God real in its community and to the extent it can around the world. The local association of churches must use its resources to strengthen its members in their efforts to fulfill their God given calling.

Focus keeps the main thing the main thing. Focus allows us to direct our energies to the real priorities of life. Focus allows us to work toward goals and see progress being made. Making the effort to focus helps overcome ADD whether in the secular or spiritual realm. Focus under the control of the Holy Spirit can change the world.

Fighting Frustration

We all have those moments. Then those moments turn into hours that turn into days that then turn into our jobs and a general description of our lives. They are moments of frustration that take on the form of some kind of hyper contagious virus that seems to consume us before we have time to react much less find the cure. We end up deciding there are two kinds of people in the world. People who admit to having times of  frustration and liars.

Am I making more of this than it really deserves? Could the Son of God ever become frustrated? When confronted by a desperate father whose son could not be cured by the disciples of Jesus, the Master himself responds with a rhetorical question, "How long?" When he meets cruel legalism in a synagogue, he grows angry over the hard hearts of those who should have understood compassion best. When he faces the blasphemous use of his Father's House of Prayer for a marketplace, his frustration becomes the motivation for a serious housecleaning!

Frustration is real. Like so many of our emotions, however, its cause is completely within our control. Just like no one can make you angry. You become angry as a decisive response to a situation. It is a decision you make on your own based upon your value system of right and wrong, good and evil, or fair and unfair. You become frustrated because of a situation that goes against your expectations at a time when your desires are important enough for you to generate a most uncomfortable emotional response. Since you cannot hold it in, it is revealed as some level of frustration. What you do with that emotion is what is seen as a positive or negative reaction.

The recorded events of Jesus' frustration always became teaching moments for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear. We would do well to make our moments of frustration times of learning as well. This might be as individuals in daily life, as churches seeking to be salt and light and yeast in our communities, or as associations bringing a cluster of churches together to accomplish a task greater than any one church could complete alone. In all these cases there are people involved. That is a recipe for frustration.

Frustration springs from unfulfilled expectations. Good buddy Webster used a simple one-word synonym, "block". That says well what we feel when our efforts do not produce the expected results. We feel blocked. It's bad enough when we can provide a good reason for hitting the wall. It is pure frustration when we cannot justify our failure to attain our goals.

Frustration can be just as real in a local church setting and in the midst of associational work. We set goals. We gather resources. We organize to give ourselves the best chance of success. Then the block appears. Not only can we not justify that hindrance, the hindrance is counter to what we believe is our purpose and prevents us from accomplishing a higher good. That's when we start calling people terrible names and accusing them of opposing the will of God.

Yet if we listen to the frustration of Jesus we can see that the situation need not be all negative. Meeting those blocks can make us aware that a moment of teaching needs to occur. In those moments Jesus taught on faith. He taught concerning the compassion of the heavenly Father. He taught about the nature of the Kingdom of God.

When we become frustrated with our work or relationships with others, perhaps we should pause for a moment and decide wherein the problem lies. Are our expectations out of line with the will of God? That is not a problem Jesus had, only his listeners. What do we need to change that would lessen the frustration? What are the expectations of others involved in the situation? Are they proving to be a hindrance through ignorance or intent? Ignorance can be cured with patience. Stubbornness needs the help of the Holy Spirit.

When an association does not seem to be accomplishing the work of the Kingdom of God as it should, frustration appears, but what is its cause? Do churches need to learn? Provide the training. Are churches being resistant to the movement of the Kingdom of God? Then perhaps only the Holy Spirit can provide the answer. Neither in our personal lives nor in our work with God's people can we assume that our frustration is always due to another's intentional effort to thwart us. It may well be that we are the ones who need to learn or adjust our expectations.