So I’m with my sleeping 2 year old daughter. As you know the best time is when they are asleep. I could think it’s safe to nip off and get something done, but then I know my daughter and she knows when I’m not there.
While she sleeps I manage to sneak in an episode of Law & Order. I love that programme. Especially the older ones – not the real old ones, the ones with Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt). This episode, called Aftershock, apparently, was first broadcast in 1996 and was the gripping last episode of that season. Usually the episode revolves around an ongoing case which the detectives investigate and the ADA prosecutes. This is the only episode that solely focussed on the lives of the character.
This episode tells how the detectives and lawyers deal with witnessing a state execution of a man they helped to convict after he raped and killed a woman. Witnessing the death has a huge impact on all of the detectives and lawyers who witness it. The episode depicts how each deals with it, or doesn’t deal with it. It ends in tragedy. I won’t tell you what the tragedy is, but it is a brilliant episode that is well worth watching.
As happens often when watching programmes as I took on board the storyline I grappled with the issues as they pertained to me.
One of the pressing issues again was the reminder that the community of faith provides an environment in which the issues of life can be shared and alleviated by the brothers and sisters and ultimately by God. For me, one of the hardest things in the world is to genuinely open up and talk about me. It is far easier to keep things over on your side and serve you and let you pour out yourself, than it is to even begin to peel away the layers of my life to lay myself vulnerable before you.
I am not promoting a constant unloading of yourself as though you’re a perpetual Jeremy Kyle/Jerry Springer exposure. Yet it really is unhealthy to walk around life keeping things within and thinking you can deal with them on your own. For a Christian who has been hurt by other Christians who have spoken maliciously or partake in regular gossip it would be understandable to keep a safe distance from such an expression of the community of grace. Yet understandable though it maybe, it’s still unhealthy.
What the Christ-like community exhibits is the painful side of being vulnerable with each other. What it exhibits as it serves each other is the ups and downs of practicing being a confessional community and that calls for times for brothers and sisters to be confident and free to be honest with each other about the issues that weigh heavily in the heart.
Even as Christ sets us free, it is so important to realise what He has set us free for, and to whom we are made free. Anything less than this makes a mockery of us professing a love that Jesus the Friend showed His disciples.
To stress, I am in no way advocating splurging and some sort of group therapy that is just about ‘getting it off your chest’ with nothing else. It can take a long to build relationships to reach the state of ease in being transparent, and it can be quick to wreck that hard work. Yet for Christ’s sake, it is worth investing time and heart into the cause, so that we know the burdens we carry we don’t carry alone. We don’t have to carry it alone, and it doesn’t have to weigh us down. There is liberation in Christ through the Body He’s given.
And with that liberation perhaps you would sleep as well as my two year old daughter does … eventually.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
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