When Our Care Is Rejected

Dear Ray,

There is something in the experience of John the Baptist that has stayed with me. He had recognized Christ. He had pointed others to Him. Yet from prison he sent a question: Was Jesus the One, or should they look for another?

Think of what that question could reach. If he had misunderstood Jesus, what had he understood about his own calling? What about all he had said? What about the life he had given to announcing Him?

One question can begin reaching backward into everything.

I think something like this can happen when we care for someone and our care is rejected. We begin by wondering whether we said the wrong thing. Before long, we are questioning our motives, our personality, our history, and whether anything we have offered came from Christ at all.

Was it love? Was it my need to be needed? Was I following Him, or simply following myself?

Those questions deserve honesty. But must one troubled response become a judgment upon our whole life?

Jesus answered John’s messengers by pointing to what was taking place. The blind were seeing. The lame were walking. The poor were hearing good news. Then, after the messengers left, He spoke to the crowd about John with extraordinary honor. His account of John is there in Matthew 11.

John’s uncertainty had not erased the man Jesus knew.

That means something to me. Christ knows us while we are still trying to understand ourselves. We can bring Him a confused heart. We do not have to explain every movement within it before we can turn toward Him.

Yet John remained in prison. We are not given an account of every question being settled before his death. We cannot make his experience into a promise that, if we trust enough, everything will become understandable.

We may abide with a question still unanswered.

This reaches into our care for one another. We see someone hurting and want to help. We listen, speak, give something of ourselves. Perhaps the person receives it. Perhaps he misunderstands us. Perhaps he simply does not want what we are offering.

And we are hurt.

The hurt alone does not tell us where the care came from. Neither does the warmth we felt while giving it. We cannot establish the source merely by examining how good or bad the experience felt.

The issue is still Zoe—the life of God within us. Is Christ supplying our love, or have we taken responsibility for producing something that only His life can produce?

There may be something very definite for Him to touch. Another person’s response may have become necessary to our peace. We may have begun needing that person to improve so that our effort will feel worthwhile. We may have mistaken seeing a need for being appointed to meet it.

But recognizing this does not require us to condemn everything that has passed through our hearts. We can let Him touch the particular thing He exposes. We do not need to declare ourselves incapable of love.

When Jesus spoke to Martha, He addressed the troubled person within the serving. She was occupied with much, and she wanted Him to make her sister help. How easily care becomes a burden under which we begin making demands.

We need to receive Him there. In the very place where we have become anxious about supplying everyone else, we need His supply.

Brother, we are also among the hungry.

Seeing another person’s weakness does not automatically give us authority over it. Love may listen. Love may offer practical help. Love may hear a refusal and allow it to remain a refusal. There are people we cannot persuade, circumstances we cannot repair, and griefs we cannot explain.

Christ’s life within us does not make us the source of another person’s life.

I think this is where the cross reaches more deeply than our outward activity. We may be willing to give hours of care while being unwilling to release the result. We may surrender our time and still hold tightly to what the other person must become.

That claim must be brought to Him too.

I do not mean that we become indifferent. Nor do I mean that we should force ourselves to appear unhurt. We can tell Him plainly that we are hurt. We can acknowledge disappointment without turning it into an accusation against the other person or a sentence against ourselves.

Our union with Him has not disappeared because our emotions are unsettled.

This is why I keep returning to abiding. Another rule about how to care will not supply the life we need. I can learn to say the right words and still be inwardly demanding a response. I can withdraw quietly and still spend the evening defending myself in my own mind.

The Lord must have access there. To the need to be understood. To the demand that our care succeed. To the sorrow we would rather hide beneath an explanation.

Ray, John brought his question to Jesus. He did not wait until he had resolved it into a worthy testimony.

We can do the same. We can turn to Christ with the unfinished thing still in our hands. He knows what is love, what is fear, and what is our desire to be needed. We can let Him show us without trying to pronounce the final judgment upon ourselves.

He is already our life. We can receive His love in the very place where our own care has left us wounded.

Your brother,
Brent