Take Care

How are you doing?

Various forms of that question are asked all the time in our society. Unfortunately, it's not generally meant as an open invitation for answering with the truth. It has come to mean the same thing as "hello" in most instances. Often, the one asking this question is caught off guard if the answer is anything but "good."

And yet, for many reasons, it is a question that needs to be asked regularly and answered honestly.

In this day and age, though, struggles of many forms are seen as fatal flaws. This often comes from a sense of shame inside oneself - a shame that keeps us from being honest with those who are truly seeking to give us the help, love, and support that we need. Our walls and defenses go up so fast and so strong that no one is allowed inside to know how we really are doing. We block ourselves off to fight alone in the battles that God's people were called to be united in.

We divide and are conquered.

What happened to the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love? What happened to the desire to live in the world without being cut from its cloth? Believers in Jesus should be the most open to sharing the issues that we face because we are a single unit! If one part is out of whack, the whole thing is! If I have a pain in my head, my feet still have to walk to the medicine cabinet and my hands still have to dispense the Tylenol. The same thing goes for the Body of Christ - if one person is struggling in their life or in their faith, it is up to the family of Believers to care for that person, not in a sense of judgment, but of reassurance and restoration.

And yet, we fall into the same traps of gossip, judgment, and hostility that the world would applaud when we find out the sins of one of our own. How can we possibly claim to belong to Christ when this is the case? Relient K put it this way in their song Down In Flames:

"The enemy is much ignored
When we fight this Christian civil war.
We're cannibals, we watch our brothers fall;
We eat our own, the bones and all."  
 Brothers and sisters, we need to rise above this! We need to be able to genuinely ask each other how we're doing, and we need to not be put off by the answers we receive. We need to be able to have vulnerability without fear of the repercussions, because this is the way that we will truly live out what James commands in his book:

"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective."
James 5:16 (NIV2011)
Let me ask again, genuinely. Please feel free to answer if you need to.

How are you doing?

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