Leslie Leyland Fields

Pass the Peace, Not the Judgment

 

Three  emails these last 3 days have pierced me.  Emails that echo a message I am hearing over and over. Stay a moment and listen.

A woman writes me from a coffee shop where she goes to find anonymity and quiet to grieve. Her young adult daughter died of a drug overdose last week.  She bears not only this, but the judgment of church members who conclude she must bear fault in this tragedy.  If she were a truly godly mother, this wouldn' t have happened.

A mother of many children wrote.  She and her husband adopted and rescued more than ten children from instability and abuse. They were stretched beyond their limits every day for more than twenty years, but knew God had called them to this ministry of love.  When the kids became teens and began acting out their prior hurts and abuses , her husband, in full-time ministry, was fired.  Her husband's  pastor believed if  this couple had truly "trained up their child in the way they should go," their children  would all be obedient, God-loving people.

 

One more. A woman with two adult children who are making some poor choices. She agonizes over their lifestyles and cannot understand how this has happened.  Didn't she devote her life to them, homeschooling, doing everything possible to raise them "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord"?  How can this happen?  She feels betrayed and confused.

 

 

How many of these stories can I recite?  More than anyone wants to hear-so I give you only these. I am grieved and burdened to hear them. But I am the blessed one who gets to hear these women on the other side, when they are bathed in the truth of the Scriptures, in the relief of their tears, rather than in myths and judgment.   They are writing in the beginning steps of freedom. They weep at realizing that though others judge them, God does not.  That their teen and adult children have made their own choices, have acted out of their own will, their own prior damage. They weep to remember God does not ask them to take His place in their family. God does not expect them to wield sovereign control over their children. They weep to realize they have indeed done what God has asked of them:  to sacrifice for their children, to live out their faith faithfully before them, to  teach them the love and laws of God.  They are beginning now to leave  the rest in God's hands not out of helplessness, but out of faith. They know, who else shall we deliver our children to? Who else loves them with an undying love? Who else rescues and redeems lives and souls?  And even if one should lose the life of her child, even then, she writes, she is not without hope.

 

This is what you, all of us, must do. The next time you see a family in church with a kid who's struggling,

or with children who no longer come, or a family with an adult child making other choices--- Pass the peace, not the judgment.  Come close to them, pass out a hug, open your ears to listen, give them your hand. Our sisters and brothers are wounded enough.  Let's quite being cop, judge and jury and leave the judgments to God. His judgments will be righteous and merciful. Ours will be harsh---and wrong.