Protecting What Is Valuable To Us

I've always had this thing for nautical-themed decorations: old fashioned ships wheels, compasses, ship models, pictures with ships and lighthouses - it just feels like "me." Most of my life I've been prancing around the globe and so, necessarily, these decorations have been left in attics and storage boxes and often sent to thrift stores or (sniff) the dump, but I really do enjoy collecting these things and decorating my "man cave" with them.

(a similar crystal ship, but not as intricate)

I remember one year for a birthday in my 20s my parents brought me a beautiful crystalline ship, crafted in exquisite detail despite its tiny size. They traveled for my birthday and brought it from Pennsylvania to South Carolina (about 12 hours in the car) in a very carefully packed box. When I opened it at my grandparents' home it was perfect in every detail - incredibly fine glass forming each line and railing and porthole. I lived just over a mile away and so when the party was over I carefully placed it on the passenger seat of my car and drove home.

I did not place it in the carefully padded box.

You can guess what happened.

5 minutes later I got home and looked down at the ship. There were countless tiny pieces of crystal that stayed on the seat when I gently picked it up. The basic shape of the hull and the mast were still there, but so many of those perfectly crafted details of the lines and wheels and railings had broken off in just those few moments of barely sliding around the seat.

Dad has always been careful with his money and I believe that this crystalline ship was not cheap. Over the next few days he spent hours with tweezers and uncountable little tubes of glue. He got it back to an item of beauty, but it would never be the same again.

It was damaged by my carelessness. It was broken because I did not pack it carefully enough and so it did not have adequate protection from even the small movements of daily life, far less the far greater "trauma" that a sudden stop or a fender bender would have caused.

Let's talk about hearts and rejection.

Imagine that instead of a crystalline ship we are preparing our hearts for the day. Our hearts experience a myriad of types and levels of rejection on a daily basis.

• Someone flips you off because they didn't like it that you had to merge into traffic. You don't know that person and will never see them again. No big deal...
• A family member tells a joke that has a bit of a "zinger" for you in the punch line. It's funny and you laugh, but, well, if we're honest it hurt just a little bit...
• You complete the project at work with your team but instead of getting the kudos and celebration you would have liked you get a fairly critical evaluation... Or the rest of the team gets the kudos but your name is forgotten in the list of contributors...
• You see a friend in the street and stop to greet them but they are late to a meeting and don't have time to talk...
• You are making a phone call and scroll past a friend's name who you haven't seen in some time.  You helped this friend out considerably a while back when they were going through a crisis but since they got through the crisis you realize they haven't called you once...
• A group of friends plan a spontaneous get-together while you are sitting right there. They don't invite you to be part of their plans...
• You participate in class and answer the prof's question and she hesitates and then gives you what is obviously a placating answer - something about what an interesting perspective and does anybody else have something they want to share...
• You sit across from a friend for lunch but she becomes absorbed in a conversation with the person beside her...

All of these (and thousands of other examples) are the little rejections that our hearts must bear on a day by day basis. If those hurt, what about the big rejections?

• You've been unemployed for so long and you get yet another letter after yet another interview saying that they found someone who was "a better fit"...
• You submit another painstakingly prepared article or even a book to a publisher and you never hear back from them...
• You invest your life for your congregation and instead of commenting on the timeliness or the content of your sermons you receive an ongoing barrage of criticism... Recently you are hearing more of that criticism from the elders... They ask you to leave...
• You do a census of the church in your area at significant cost and time to contribute towards the overall health and wellbeing of the churches. The leader of the denomination writes an email to all the pastors in the area telling them not to believe the results of the study and specifically not to trust you...
• Your spouse of many years leaves you for someone else...
• Your close friend or family member dies and leaves you to pick up the pieces by yourself...

Rejection hurts, but it need not wound. ("Dealing with the Rejection and Praise of Men", Sorge, p21)

WHAT?! Dude, if you can say that then you've never dealt with rejection!

That was my first reaction when I read that sentence. But then I re-read that sentence several times and realized it was really very nuanced. It acknowledges the hurt. But it prepares us for the possibility that there may be a way to protect our hearts from being deeply wounded. Here's the way, once again according to Sorge:

Rejection is a trial - but the acceptance of the Father is a healing ointment. (p21)

This idea is big, but I think the "healing ointment" is maybe not the best metaphor. I'd like us to explore the metaphor of the Father's acceptance being the packing materials that protect our hearts from the bumps and jostles and trauma of living life in a fallen world.

We are working in a heart warehouse. These hearts are so fragile, so delicate, they can be deeply wounded by a feather lightly brushing or even by a breath of wind. We have just received a shipment of a fancy new foam that will provide a perfect environment to protect the hearts and allow them to thrive. With the protective foam fully in place a building can fall on top of a heart and it will feel the jostling but it will not be damaged. As long as the hearts are fully encased in this foam they will feel those bumps ("Rejection hurts...") but the hearts will not be broken by them ("...but it need not wound.")   

 

Obviously the heart is deep within - you didn't think you'd SEE it?!

But to make this metaphor work we have to take into account our forgetfulness: we are constantly in the process of either being reminded of or of forgetting God's love and acceptance. Constantly.

This fancy new foam we just got has incredible properties for protecting against even the most horrendous collisions and crises and pressures of life. But as soon as the foam is sprayed on it starts to break down. Sometimes it breaks down rapidly and sometimes it breaks down slowly but it always breaks down. The only way to maintain the protection is by continually spraying on a new layer of the foam. 

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that God's love and acceptance is defective and breaks down over time. I'm saying that I FORGET His love and acceptance. And the only way to fight back against this forgetfulness and keep my heart nestled fully within the protective "foam" is to constantly remind myself and be reminded of that love and acceptance.

Without permission (sorry, Mr Sorge) I'm going to quote a fairly extended portion of this book starting on page 23:

The next step to becoming free from the power of rejection is in accepting your heavenly Father's love for you. When this love really touches your heart, it burns away the cords that rejection would bind around your heart.

But here's the key: you must believe John 3:16! "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." He loves you so much that He gave His one and only begotten Son - the Son that He loves so desperately - to the death of the cross. You must believe the good news that God loves you this much.

And once you believe this love, you must receive this love. If you will accept His passion for you, it will wash over you "in fathomless billows of love" (so said the old gospel song). His love will renew, saturate, strengthen, sustain, lift, and empower you. His love is the greatest power in the universe.

... Oh the power that is released when we believe and accept His love for us! He loves you despite your immaturity. He loves you even with your volatile temper problem. He loves you even with your body weight. He loves you even with your struggles with lust. He accepts you even with all your quirky ways. He accepts you because of who He is, not because of who you are. Let the Holy Spirit place this deep within your consciousness: you are wildly and irrevocably loved and enjoyed by God!

Until you are established on the inside in the love of God, you will always be susceptible to rejection's woundings. 

Now besides being reminded of His love and acceptance there is also another issue. I have to value His love and acceptance so much that everything (!) else pales in comparison. This is what Paul was talking about in Phillipians 3:7-11:

⁷ But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸ What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. ¹⁰ I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Paul is not saying that the things that were gains were actually losses nor that everything is actually a loss nor that everything is actually garbage. He is stating that in comparison with that highest value, everything else looks like junk. In comparison. 

Let's say you were employed doing rough carpentry, making fences of split boards, and then you found a new job for a year in a cabinetry shop making the finest of fine furniture. The split boards and the fences are no less valuable (they accomplish an important purpose), but now that your eye has become used to near perfection for a period of time, in comparison those fences are going to look pretty rough.

Let's say you are an economist or an accountant by trade and all week long you are carefully and precisely working with hundreds of millions of dollars. Then Saturday morning comes and your 5-year-old child asks you to help them with their lemonade stand on the front lawn selling cups of lemonade for 5 cents each to the neighbors. Your child is pretty thrilled with the 85 cents that were gathered in the cup over the course of the morning (and you very quickly decided not to mention the $2.99 that you paid for the lemonade mix being used) and it's not nothing. It's worth something. But your day job has convinced you that in comparison 85 cents is really not that much.

That's the kind of comparison we need to be doing when it comes to the love and acceptance of our Father. His love and acceptance MATTERS in a way that nothing else can compare to.

Although God's love and acceptance are constant, my perception matters; I have to be convinced of the overwhelming worth of His love and acceptance for it to have an impact on my heart's resilience to rejection. A child could be traumatized by a trip to the zoo if he/she is not convinced that the cages will hold. The actual strength of the cages is not in doubt; it is the perception, the belief, of the child that makes the difference in terms of the emotional impact. (Hmmm... Might this be why God makes such a big deal about believing...?)

So it seems there are 2 things we need to keep in mind:

1. I've got to be so soaked in Him, so obsessed with Him that I truly value His love and acceptance so much that anything else is incomparable
2. I've got to keep being soaked in Him and reminding myself of His love on an ongoing basis for a lifetime so that I don't forget, or at least so that the reminders outweigh the forgetfulness...

Meditation...

Worship...

Soak in His love...

Read from His love letter to us...

Talk to and listen with attention to the One Who loves us...

THIS is why we must encounter the living God on a daily basis, not just so we can put a mental checkbox next to the task labeled "have your quiet time"... And it's not going to happen in a 15 minute session. That "foam" can break down in one intense session of losing my keys before I even get in the car to go to work! I've got to make meditation and worship and soaking in His love my secret background tune going on in my head from the moment I wake up until the moment I drift off to sleep. Nobody else knows it's there (unless they catch us moving our lips periodically) but it makes all the difference...