Works in Progress

I’ve already written (briefly) about how we should live in these divided, conflict-heavy times. We should practice mercy. But practicing mercy to those with whom we fundamentally disagree at a gut level is very difficult, to say the least. What can help us be better at showing mercy to those we’d rather show judgment?

First, and most importantly, God.

He has to be the one to reanimate the deadened parts of our hearts that have no compassion left. If he doesn’t move in us, we don’t move. For, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). And “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36). He is what lets us show mercy.

But secondarily, how might he do that in us in a way we can recognize? One way is by helping us see with new eyes — with eyes that see those around us not as encircling enemies, but as fellow works in progress in need of rescue.

According to the Bible, anyone we meet is a work in progress.

And not just a work in progress, but a wrecked, broken down mess of a human, desperately in need of repair (Rom. 3:10-18; 7:18). None of us has it all together. All of us are plagued by an on-going war within ourselves (Rom. 7:18-25).

This means anyone you know or meet is — on a day to day, moment by moment basis — beset by the same kinds of deep-seated fears and damaging insecurities that you are.

That’s what drives them to hide from you or hurt you. Not an alternative set of political or social beliefs (though that may be what is on the surface), but a deeply rooted fear or insecurity.

It’s a heart gripped by a fear or an insecurity.

The fear of not having enough or not being enough; of not being valued or not belonging; of being powerless or being forgotten.

They arise from a heart that wants something good, but is afraid it won’t get it. So that heart finds its own way to have what it feels it must have right then and there, regardless of whether having it the way it feels it must would ultimately damage that heart (or someone else’s) or not.

This is where we go wrong. This is when we cause pain: when we seek good things in the wrong way.

We are so often a tangled web of insecurities playing upon insecurities and fears playing upon fears. All of which presume that God does not exist, is not good and loving, is not powerful enough or does not care enough to help us. Which means the brokenness you see around you actually comes, at its root, from a belief that God is not who he says he is.

That’s a fear we all share at some level.

When we see that someone else has the same fear we do, it helps us respond to their fears and insecurities differently.

It helps us respond with mercy. Because now we can spot the root fear — that God isn’t the God he says he is — and we can respond (if only in our hearts) with the only antidote to that fear: the faith that says, “He is who he says he is.”

It’s when we believe with our souls that God is good and he will provide for us (whether in this life or the life to come) that we grow in our ability to move towards others in mercy. Then we are no longer in the grips of the fears and insecurities that would lock us into a battle for scarce resources in a world without God. Instead, we know ourselves to be in a world with our God who saves us, though one that is not yet as it should be.

Knowing this, we can start to look at those around us who cause us pain or frustration with the mercy that recognizes that we are a broken, fearful mess too, but God provides for broken, fearful people — even like us. We don’t have to share their fear, even though their fear may bring us pain. We can stand in our faith and take the pain they cause to the Lord and know that he can take it for us. He already took more of it than we can ever imagine at the cross (Isaiah 53:4-11). What then shall he not carry for us now (Rom. 8:32)?

This practice — looking for the fear behind the pain our fellow works in progress cause us and responding to it with faith in our God — helps us show mercy.

So, let us entrust ourselves to God, whose perfect love casts out our fear (1 John 4:18) and practice mercy as those set free from fear.