Sharing Burdens With Church Family, and Other Stuff

What's the longest you've ever prayed for someone's salvation?

My highest number? Fifteen years. Not just for one person, but for an entire clan.

One of the fifteen-year people will be visiting soon, for two weeks. She isn't staying with us, but with her sister, who resides in a neighboring township twenty minutes away.

These visits emotionally tax me. On the one hand, it is good to be around family.  But on the other hand, lots of preparation needs to be done, including changing the prayers in our prayer jars to reflect not salvation prayers, but prayers that everyone we know will experience God's peace. Mealtime is shared with visitors whenever possible, and mealtime is prayer-jar time. The clan of people I pray for? They range in their hostility to the gospel, and our visitor ranks pretty high on the hostility chart. Hearing a five-year-old pray for our visitor's salvation, in the visitor's presence? That wouldn't go over well at all.

With Christian family, you can share your burdens easily. But with non-Christian family, you have to be more careful of what you say. The amount of stress we've endured the last three years has been unusually high. Mostly I take it in stride, but sometimes it feels like a dam of tears could explode any minute--and that shouldn't happen in front of someone who believes that God either never existed, or, that he created the world and promptly stepped away, never to return.

If I let my burdens lose during one of these visits, would it look like I'm experiencing God's peace? Not to someone with an observation window of two weeks, every two years. She could never gather an accurate picture of our lives in these short Ohio visits, which don't even include daily visiting time. There are complicated reasons she stays with her sister instead of with us--reasons that have little to do with us, for the most part. I can't go into the reasons here.

Peter is a small part of it. I can say that much. He's a charmer one-on-one, but when people visit us the irritation he inflicts becomes evident after an hour or so. It pains me to see, though as his mother I know how difficult ADHD frenzy is to endure. He talks incessantly, he monopolizes attention, he fixates on one subject (usually nature). When people are here more than two hours, they find him exhausting. Unfortunately, he's missing the impulse control to stop his social onslaught. His medicine only subdues some of the hyperactivity; it does little for the impulse control. Church staff love him at the AWANA church, and at our church. They see him as highly engaging and smart. He is both those things, when you encounter him in short doses.

I'm used to loving difficult people, and even for me, it never gets easier. So I do understand.

But does that keep the heartache away? Surely not. It hurts to know people need to get away from my son. And there's nothing I can do about it. He's developed the social sense to know when people feel overwhelmed, but the control isn't there to back away.

I heard my dad remark once, about his nephew: "That boy is one of the most irritating people I know. I can't stand to be around him."  I asked him if he'd heard that Charlie--age 19 at the time--had ADHD. No, he'd never heard, and the revelation didn't fill him with grace either. He still felt nothing but disdain.

I'm all about people being held accountable for their actions, no matter what caused them. But a frenzied personality is not misbehavior. Whatever happened to, "There, but for the grace of God, go I?" 

I wish extended-family grace for my son, who didn't choose to live a hellish existence. The impulse control everyone else finds effortless, constantly eludes him.

Changing gears a little...

...Our church body broke up into small groups for prayer yesterday, instead of having a regular service. A church member lost her mother from a tragic motorcycle accident two days before, and her father was not expected to make it through the day. Other heavy things had happened to the body that week as well, so the pastor brought us together to share our burdens. Church is family, he told us. Yes, it's hard to share. But we cannot continue to enter church every week, pretending that everything is okay. No more phony.

He wants us to share the heavy of this life and be real.

The miracle is that my husband and I? Just the week before we remarked that not a soul knows our burdens in that church, and neither do we know much about our church body. Everyone smiles and shakes hands, but nothing real ever happens. It's not a potluck church in which everyone visits often, knows who needs prayer, and who bakes the best pies. The church does, however, do a wonderful job of reaching the community for Christ. But reaching each other? That needs work.

So, the congregation dutifully, but nervously, broke into small circles with the school cafeteria chairs. We are a 2.5-year-old, 170-member church plant that meets in the local elementary school.

When it was my turn to share a burden for prayer, I asked that a single-mother acquaintance of mine, who just earned a high-school teaching credential and amassed $72,000 in student loans, could find a job, even though there were no prospects and no sub jobs happening.

When it was my husband's turn, his voice wavered and though I couldn't see his face, I knew he was softly crying. You see, our Beth is in the worst arthritis flare we've seen. He's gone in the mornings by 7 AM, so he doesn't see how Beth struggles to walk, or how she starts the day crawling. It's not an easy sight.

By the time he walks through the door at 7 PM, she's feeling pretty lose most days. Thus, his tears on Sunday morning, when she walked like a stiff robot down the school hallway, oh so slowly.


His reaction broke me, and reminded me of how hard it will be for my relative during her visit, if Beth's flare doesn't subside. It's one thing to hear that a three-year-old you're related to has arthritis, but quite another to watch the reality.

How will she feel about God as she watches Beth in pain? Will the reality embitter her even more toward the Almighty?

Will Beth break out in her current favorite song, sung in her sweet, articulation-challenged voice, with her body-swaying, big-smiling enthusiasm lighting up hearts?

Stop and Let Me Tell You


Stop, and let me tell you
What the Lord has done for me.


Stop, and let me tell you
What the Lord has done for me.


He forgave my sins and he saved my soul.
He cleansed my heart and he made me whole.


Stop, and let me tell you
What the Lord has done for me.



Yes, Lord. May it be so. May she sing it out for your glory, and may it transform our visitor's heart. May the singing and the singer, reveal the truth of the gospel life:

That things aren't necessarily sweet when you're a Christian.
They're just grace-filled and achingly beautiful. 


Please pray? And friend, how can I pray for you? You can be real with me in this space. Comments are on delay.
 
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