fact, denial and acceptance have extremely different personalities and life goals.
Denial claims to honor God by minimizing the sacrifice; acceptance actually honors God by embracing the sacrifice and still considering him to be worth it. Denial shrinks the story, collapsing grief and trauma and fear and loss into a singularity; acceptance explodes the story, showcasing the magnificent power of God through the grief and trauma and fear and loss.
Acceptance leads to deep emotional health, grace, contentment, processed grief, and a willingness to see the long view, both forward and backward. Denial leads to, well, nothing. Denial is a full stop, halting maturation and ongoing discipleship. Acceptance is a grand “to be continued,” allowing for what was, while simultaneously looking forward to what will be.
What Is it that I Really Need?
Before deciding whether to mitigate or sacrifice, we must seek to know our sacrifice. How do we do that? Ask the question, “What is it that I really need?” Many of us never do this. We have a strong aversion to saying “I need,” which is ironic because the Jesus we serve often responded really well to folks who led with their needs.
Our needs must be named, if only to be offered up willingly. Abraham’s boy who carried wood and fire had a name. Paul sought to mitigate his thorn, and then ended up gloriously sacrificing his need to have it extracted. Jesus saw and comprehended skull-hill, attempted to mitigate it, and then climbed it.
Sometimes the cup doesn’t pass.
Mitigate and Sacrifice
To mitigate is to make something less severe, less painful, less onerous. So, can I please encourage you? If there’s something severe, painful, and onerous about life and ministry abroad, and if that hard thing can be lessened, for goodness sake, lessen it.
But if it cannot be lessened (and this will often be the case), then it must be sacrificed with your eyes and hearts open. At those times, we must remember, over and over and over again, why we’re here. And when a sacrifice is required, we rest in God’s ultimate goodness. We obediently make the sacrifice, casting ourselves on the grace and mercy of our King.
~~~~~~~~~~
We believe that there are indeed sacrifices to be made.
We believe that those sacrifices do in fact cost something.
AND
We believe that eternity will bear witness:
The cost was not too high,
The cross remains enough,
The Christ, once seen face to face, will make it all imminently worth it,
Forever.
4. Jones, “Why I Will Not Say,” line 4.
The Gaping Hole in Modern Missions
by Jonathan
I think something’s missing.
It’s something that Jesus loved (and studied) a whole lot.
It’s missing because it doesn’t really fit into our Discovery Bible story sets. It doesn’t seem to add value to our NGOs or leadership trainings. It doesn’t offer an immediate return on investment or accelerate the planting and growing of churches.
It’s the Psalms. We’re missing the Psalms, and it’s hurting us.
I grew up reading the psalms. Our family did the “read a psalm and then add thirty until you can’t go any further” thing. For example, on the 12th of the month we’d read Psalm 12 and Psalm 42 and Psalm 72 and so on. It was boring and predictable, but also transformational.
I began re-reading the Psalms in earnest about a year ago. I bought a commentary. I started reading books and articles. I began teaching them, singing them, and preaching them. And I started noticing their conspicuous absence.
And I’ve come to believe that my country of origin (America) and my country of destination (Cambodia) desperately need the depth and breadth of the Psalms. We need more psalms in our families and our agencies. We need more psalms in our church plants and Bible schools. We need to steep our discipleship strategies in the Psalms. (Many of our more liturgical siblings never really stopped reading the Psalms, and for this portion of their orthopraxy, I’m very grateful.)
But we don’t spend much time in the Psalms. We really don’t. The prayer book of the Bible, the book most oft-quoted by Jesus himself, gets relegated to the background with an occasional nod to the pastoral Psalm 23 and a sideways glance at the beautiful Psalm 139. But that’s not enough.
Full immersion is needed.
Making the Case for the Psalms
We need the Psalms; not because they will teach us how to be super Christians, but because they will teach us how to be human Christians. I know that sounds silly, but there are a lot of dissociated folks who are trying to follow the Son of Man divorced from their own earthy humanity.
The Psalms teach us what it means to live, breathe, feel, and follow. Here. Now. What does it look like to follow Jesus and still feel all this stuff? Life’s a freaking roller coaster. Just like the Psalms.
Author N. T. Wright describes the Psalter Coaster like this:
“The celebration is wild and uninhibited; the misery is deep and horrible. One moment we are chanting, perhaps clapping our hands in time, even stamping our feet . . . The next moment we have tears running down our cheeks, and we want the earth to open and swallow us.”5
Sounds a bit like life. Basically, the Psalms identify (and make allowance for) our humanity. In fact, the Psalms allow more raw humanity than many churches. Again, Wright illuminates:
“The Psalms not only insist that we are called to live at the intersection of God’s space and our space, of heaven and earth, to be (in other words) Temple people. They call us to live at the intersection of sacred space, the Temple and the holy land that surrounds it, and the rest of human space, the world where idolatry and injustice still wreak their misery.”6
How do we live at that intersection, connecting worlds, without being ripped apart? The Psalms will show us.
The Full Spectrum of Emotions
The Psalms speak to core human needs and feelings without resorting to clichés. There are more than enough platitudes floating around already; we need the Psalms to teach us how to care about people without adding to the detritus.
What emotions are a believer allowed to have? What feelings are against the rules? The Psalms show us, and the answer is shocking: they’re pretty much all allowed. That’s not to say that all actions are allowed, but pretty much all the feelings are. In fact, the Psalms teach us how not to avoid uncomfortable feelings.
Whatever the emotion, keep talking to God. The psalmists sure did. We are to pray with (maybe because of) our uncomfortable emotions. We enter our prayer closets with all of our hearts. There’s no need to cut pieces off before initiating
