“If
you want your pastoral care to leap light-years ahead,” advises Fred D.
McGehee, “fill it with genuineness,
accurate empathy, and a gift-love known as nonpossessive warmth.” Or, as an older pastoral tract puts it, be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to
wrath.
Empathy,
McGehee contends, is “everyday mind reading” in which we enter the experience
of others and thus find ourselves comprehending their words and actions.
“Empathetic persons,” he concludes, “find it easy to believe in incarnation.” If
I refuse the small act of inhabiting someone else’s thoughts, feelings and
motives I can scarcely believe that God the Son really moved into my
neighborhood of mortal flesh and was at all points tempted. If I am swift to
hear, I can take other people seriously by letting their reality colonize my
own.
“Genuine people,” McGehee explains,
“model healthy self-disclosure. Consequently, they have less difficulty
believing in divine revelation.” Oddly enough, silence can be more revealing
than speech because it leaves our actions to write their own, unadjusted
autobiography. If I’m choking up on the bat of self-disclosure, it’s hard to
believe that God would swing away, even in the person of Jesus Christ. If I am
slow to speak, I can belay the verbal spin-doctoring that protects my crafted
self-image; people can see who I really am.
Nonpossessive
warmth loves without controlling. “The sole reward to the giver,” McGehee
explains, “is to see the good this high positive regard does in the receiver’s
life.” Consequently, “because of the way persons who practice nonpossessive
warmth live their lives, they find it easy to believe in the biblical concept
of divine redemption.” If I constantly calculate the payoff for loving others,
I find it difficult to believe God doesn’t keep the same kind of balance sheet.
If I quit angling for a jackpot I can stop being mad when loving people fails
to pay off.
Incarnation,
revelation, and redemption: If I will listen up, shut up, and give up, I can
invite people to experience the God of the Bible. Better still, I can even experience
that God myself.
Believe
Up to What You Live,
Doug
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