If you have never been to Ireland, you should most definitely go. Just don’t go with four or more Georgia peaches in tow, otherwise your effort to pick up a local accent will be severely inhibited by the effortless ease in which “ya’ll” is adapted, even after two weeks of being influenced by sheep-herding, seaweed-eating Irish locals.
When I signed up for a month-long missions trip to the tiny northern village of Buncrana with Adventures last summer, I expected to see God show up. What I didn’t expect was for Him to reveal himself in the corner bar at one in the morning, or in scars on the wrists of well-dressed high schoolers – scars that, while more recently provoked, matched my own.
I didn’t expect for religious strife to have a pale-skinned, green-eyed face, or to have my heart ripped apart by the testimonies of neglect and rejection people had been branded with from the mouths of Christians who cited the name of Jesus as a reason to speak in such a way.
One evening near the middle of our trip, my team was visited by a team of missionaries who were living and serving in the southern part of Ireland. After dinner, as we all settled into comfortable corners in the living room of our holiday home, one of the women told us through tears and clenched hands how her faith in God has been rocked when her brother came out as gay, and experienced rejection from his childhood church. It had pushed him away from his faith, and even caused him to attempt to take his own life.
The next day, a woman I had a drink with at a local bar confided in me that she hated the Catholic Church because of the way it had ostracized her son when he had questioned his sexuality. In response to the church’s rejection, she and her family had walked away from their faith entirely. “How can I worship a God I had always believed to love me unconditionally when the church, who had claimed to love my boy, now tell me that my son is vile, and is now going to hell?”
Pain. Rejection. Despair. Depression. Hatred for the church. Society was offering no resolution, and Christians had responded by heaping on coals of judgement. Please leave. You and your sin aren’t wanted here.
Suddenly, every word, opinion and side-comment I had ever heard Christians speak about the issue of homosexuality or depression in the church faded to white noise. None of it mattered, because I knew that these people had never gazed into the face of a teenager covered in so much self-hatred that she could barely look someone in the eye. They had never made a birthday cake for a 17 year-old boy who was only blowing out another candle because the Coast Guard had showed up in time to perform CPR.
On the plane back from Dublin last summer, God wrecked me. I had heard Macklemore’s single Same Love at least ten times, but sitting tucked into that economy seat with miles growing between my feet and Irish hills, I listened to this song and felt a deep grief come over me in a way that absolutely took my breath away. I pulled my sweater hood down over my eyes, and there in the cramped airplane surrounded by hundreds of dozing people, I cried uncontrollably. My heart was broken, and I knew it would never be one again.
And God didn’t break my heart for being gay, or for depression, or loneliness. He broke my heart for the way that we, the church, the image bearers and body of Jesus, have been treating those who go to bed at night and wake up in the morning with these struggles looming. It’s why in 2014, being a Christian is somehow insidiously synonymous with hypocrisy. It’s why we have a song in the top 40 with lyrics like,
“And “God loves all his children” is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago
I don’t know
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to.”
The world is irreparably broken, and the church holds the light. We are commanded to shine from the hilltops, to be a safe place where the wounded can come and find refuge. No doctor is going to turn a critically ill patient out of the hospital ward because they are too sick for hospital standards. The standard is restoration. In the church, it should be the very same.
To sum this up, I just have to say this:
If you don’t like buzzwords like feminism, homosexuality, suicide, and depression, you probably won’t like this blog very much. In all honesty, you probably won’t like me very much.
And while I understand that taking on the title of “missionary” necessitates a certain self-awareness and political correctness adopted in order not to offend or ostracize Christians en masse, I cannot help but continue to write candidly, and be anything but myself. Hopefully, this is alright with you – because these words are for the people who have been offended and ostracized by those of us trying too hard to be politically correct.
I know my heart will not rest until I have wasted myself pouring out love and truth on those who live under the weight of darkness and judgement every day. God has given me my calling.
So my question to you, dear reader, is what makes you cry?
And what are you going to do about it?
