Sometimes when I think of the plethora of problems this world has, I find myself throwing up my hands in frustration! I feel like a mini-me in a multibillion digital cosmos that’s slowly imploding. What can little old me do about this monstrous mess we’re in? And then, for a couple of days I let myself slip into that horrible sea of hopelessness. What gets me out, I find, are simple things. And one of them is the wonderful gift that the founder of the United Methodist Church has given us called Wesley’s Three Simple Rules. Do you know them?
1) Do no harm.
2) Do all the good you can.
3) Stay in love with God.
The one we United Methodists tend to focus on, and love is the second of these rules: DO ALL THE GOOD YOU CAN! We have a wonderful quote we all have memorized:
“Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can,
in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can,
as long as ever you can.”
In fact, it used to be that many of us had a card with this quote on it in our wallet or our purse! In fact, I still do! And don’t get me wrong, doing good is great stuff.
To be truthful, I think this world we live in could be greatly improved if we focused on the “first” of John Wesley’s rules: DO NO HARM! I remember, for instance, a time when Cyndy and I were struggling in our marriage. We finally got up enough courage to go to a counselor, and as we shared our hurts and pains with this patient counselor, she stopped at the beginning of our third session and gave us an order. “The first task towards healing,” she said “is to stop hurting each other! You two are in so much pain that you’ve turned all your anger and frustrations on the one you love the most. Your pain has now turned into arrows. And you are shooting them at each other. So, stop doing that! Your home needs to be a healing place. So, this week claim 20 minutes and declare that time a safe zone. Get up, take each other’s hand, and go for a walk. And if you can’t say anything good, then don’t say anything. Make a pact to make those 20 minutes safe.”
And so, Cyndy and I went home determined to do just that. Those first few walks were pretty quiet, but as the weeks went on, we found grace sneaking back into our relationship here and there. And after a couple 100 miles we found our marriage again—the bond that God had gifted us with. That gift of a safe place that was there in between us. The sacred cleft that God had granted us in our union. And any time we struggle, we often realize that we have stopped walking together.
When I look back at that time, I often reflect on a Weekly Reader exposé I read in 3rd grade. (Do you remember that little news magazine we all got in school? We used to get ours on Thursdays, and because of the Weekly Reader I still find Thursdays to be a favorite.) It featured the city of Pittsburgh and its’ struggles to make the Monongahela River safe again. For years, it had been polluted by coal mining and more. But what they had found was that if they just stopped doing harm to that river, that the river would eventually heal itself. You see, inherent in so much of God’s creation is the gift to heal when it is given a safe place to do so. And in so many ways, that is what happened to our marriage. When Cyndy and I made the commitment to stop polluting our relationship with hurtful words and thoughts, our marriage began to heal itself! In a sense we gave our marriage a sabbath and that sabbath healed it!
As many of you know, I’m a victim of sexual abuse as a child. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with that. But one of the things that set me to work on healing from this trauma was the fact that some victims of sexual abuse who don’t heal can take that pain and turn it not inward, but outward, and in so doing end up injuring someone else sexually. (The statistics on this are unclear and have been used by some to inflict pain on victims by labeling them. Some statistics say about 1/3 of those who have been abused become abusers themselves. But new research states that the true statistic is more like 10%). One of the truths I have learned in this work of healing is that pain has to come out somehow. It’s an energy that needs to come out or be released. If you keep it in, the chances are that it will find some way to come out on its’ own. In other words, we need to find healthy ways to let that pain be released! And if we don’t? Watch out! It will come out sideways and hurtful. So, for me as I work through the harm done to me, “Doing no harm” is a critical tool and indeed a useful directive.
And that leads me back to my first struggle. Being overwhelmed by what is going on in the world. Many change agents will tell you that the only thing in this world we really have the power to change is ourselves. We don’t really change the world by spending all of our energy out there changing someone we are frustrated with. We change the world by changing ourselves. We change the world by becoming healthier human beings. We change the world by looking deep inside to see where we still hold biases towards other in our hearts. We change the world by becoming aware of the places we do harm to others and making a commitment to stop doing it.
Think about it. Why do so many people do harm? Why are there so many people out there screaming and shouting at each other? My guess is it has something to do with pain. They are hurting and aren't involved in doing the hard work of healing, and instead, have turned all that pain outward towards others. They are hard at work doing harm. Let’s not be those folks. Let’s work hard at healing, so we can be like Jesus: being healers of others.
Your friend and pastor, working hard on the wounded gift that is me, Brook