Who we are, too.

I am almost tempted to entitle this post “Ponderings. Part 3.” However, I’ve realized that continuing to label all my thoughts on how encountering persistent injustice is affecting me with new numbers each time might get a little out of hand.

We’ve been teaching some pretty marginalized women for a couple months now. Each day I come home and am either in tears or beyond them. I am indescribably alive and broken at the same moment for being involved in their lives. We cry out to God in desperation about their situations. We plead for their lives and well-being. We return and have found in some cases their situations are worse. Now granted, my perspective is short and finite. But my perspective is really all that these initial, daily reactions come from. I wonder why things seem to keep going from bad to worse for these ladies.

Remember this struggle I posted a couple months ago about how intellectually I know that God sees all and loves all yet suffering and injustice persist? I have found myself back at that very place of deep wrestling the last couple weeks particular to all the stories from the prison. I went back again and read some of the scriptures that always apply to these situations and the series of sermons I read on “Sin, Evil and Suffering” by Flemming Rutledge that point me again to the cross. Many thoughts here are borrowed from those writings and people I’ve been talking with.

One of the better things I’ve heard lately is that if we refuse to process the evil and suffering around us and in the world, we will disengage with God or people who are experiencing injustice. I think we also lose sight of who we are. I’m tempted to think (as an 'easy' answer that doesn't involve so much processing) it would be very easy if we could just rid the world of those who are inflicting grand injustice – the ‘Mugabes’– we would solve all of our problems. I’m finding it’s harder to “confess [my] own sin and seek transformation.” I’m being reminded that ridding would include me (reminded with a great deal of help from Scripture and Rutledge’s teaching). Within each of us lie a victim and a victimizer. No one is above being unjust. Jesus entered the pain that the marginalized so easily relate to, but he was also “numbered among the transgressors.” He was made to be sin for us. If we reject what he did for perpetrators; we reject what he did for us.

Psalm 82 and 110 have been speaking a lot to me on this subject as well. God directs people to: “Give justice…and rescue the week and needy.” The foundations of the earth are shaken at injustice. It simply offends the plan. The hope is that even though we live with injustice and fight it within ourselves, we are morning dew, giving life to the world. That’s the part of going to the teach these women that makes me feel more alive than most any other part of my week. And there’s resolution. In the end things will be made right (end of Psalm 110). Man’s justice is not the final justice. I have no idea what that’s going to look like just as Jesus’ contemporaries had no idea what Old Testament prophecy about a Messiah would really look like. And they were surprised. So maybe there’s no revenge, smackdown and unleashing of anger like I would desire some days against ‘Mugabes.’ Maybe that’s already been taken out on someone who became a transgressor. We just don’t know how it’s going to go. But we know the final justice is good, complete, right and loving.

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God.” – Micah 6:8

Let’s make this a conversation. What are you learning it means to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly in your situation? It’s something I’ve been pondering lately. Shoot me an email or comment with your thoughts. Love you all and am so glad for the many teachers you are to me and the input you give to my life.