Turning on the news or scrolling through social media, we discover that our world is full of violence and brokenness. We have a choice of how we live our lives. We can choose to live with kindness or wickedness. As Christians, we must choose kindness. With that choice, we must make changes and growth in our hearts, actions, and our churches.
Chaos. Some people love the world of chaos. I always know the students in my classroom who will create chaos as they will tell me that they do not want “drama” in their lives. Every single student who has said that has been involved and even created the drama circling around their persona. They live for the chaos. With the chaos, they either receive attention, or they can divert the attention off them and spread it onto others. Their victims get hit and their lives are turned upside down until they can gain control again. We cannot always control the chaos, but we can control how we respond to other people’s chaos, and we can choose not to create chaos for those around us.
Christians must choose not to create chaos. We choose chaos when we choose to berate and insult people in real life and online. When we attack people online with our words, we don’t realize that they may have difficulty springing to life as they have chaos in other dimensions swirling around them. We must choose kindness and use our words to inspire them. They may have done wrong, but insults and cruelty will not change their actions but their attitudes toward those who are insulting them in a negative way.
Our words must be full of love, truth, and kindness. Yes, we can speak the truth, IN LOVE. Without speaking the truth in love, your words are worthless and create chaotic situations. I have had to learn not to reply to everyone online who make statements to incite arguments. I have also learned to not ask those people questions. I don’t want to incite chaos. I have, and the result is not fun. Let’s all work to inspire others with love, truth, and kindness.
When we choose our words with love and kindness, we are changing, and our change creates growth in us. We don’t have to comprise our beliefs, but we can compromise our strategies and be innovative and think of new ways to approach people. Imagine a world where people are striving to be more kind with their words. The truth would prevail with love. Change in everyone would occur. We change when we hear the truth, and it touches us. We don’t change when someone tries to force us to believe the truth. Force is never used in scripture where the gospel is concerned.
The church must become a place of restoration and healing. It should never be a place of blasting those that believe differently than us. We restore relationships when we show that we care more about the person than the issue for which they are standing and fighting for. The church is to be a hospital, not a museum. A hospital is full of people restoring others to health and life. A museum is full of relics and death. Our love for traditions and rightness cannot outweigh our love for humans. Restoring people to health requires that we communicate and serve with sacrifice.
We must become peacemakers. We must admit that our own words and actions can inflict others and inspire them to do good or evil. There is no place for racism in the church. The most insane action the church has done is to go on the mission field to other countries proclaiming the gospel, and then at home segregating ourselves from those same people and their culture. God brings people into our lives. How we respond to that action reveals our faith and love in God.
We have a choice. We can choose to love others with the love of Jesus and repair relationships, or we can continue to defend our rightness and destroy relationships with people who need to meet Jesus. We say all the right words on Sunday mornings. It’s time we take our Sunday morning talk outside of the church and into the streets with our friends who need Jesus. Let us love with our words and be peaceful. It all starts once we decide to spring into life and let the life of Jesus shine through us. Maybe this next weekend we can have stories of people helping and saving others instead of killing them.
These lives needed our world to be full of peace and love. Let’s change and be full of love and kindness in their memory.
Roberta A. Drury
Andre Mackneil
Katherine Massey
Margus D. Morrison
Heyward Patterson
Aaron Salter
Geraldine Talley
Ruth Whitfield
Pearl Young
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