We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Corrective Love
Kathy Escobar posted the other day about providing “corrective experiences” to those who have been hurt in the past. How many of us have approached Christians with our wounds and have been offered more of the same instead of the love and acceptance we’re longing for? How beautiful it would be if the church could become a place where we could reveal ourselves in all of our messy realness and receive the gift of a love that counters what we might expect. Let’s commit to being that for one another and for those who tip-toe into our places of worship.
From Kathy’s blog post:
it gets me all fired up about what could be if we focused less on programming and more on relationship. less on theological correctness and more on practice. less on the surface and more on the deep places of our hearts.
yeah, my dream is that the body of Christ was widely known as an army of healers, people who…
blow minds and hearts away with Jesus’ radical love and acceptance.
spark some freaky feeling inside hurting people where they go “huh, that’s weird, i thought christians were judgmental”
ignite a flicker of a flame inside that says “maybe God does love me”
restore dignity where it’s been stripped.
build worth and value where it’s been destroyed.
are safe and healthy and embody what so many of us didn’t get in our broken families.
may we play our small part in creating corrective experiences where others feel God’s love, hope, mercy, dignity, justice, and heart for them through us–his flawed but willing ambassadors this side of heaven.
Category: General
Tags: Growth, healing, Kathy Escobar, Kingdom Living, Love, safety
Related Reading
What Motivates Torture “In Jesus’ Name”?
Why has the church, at times, tortured and murdered people? What motivates killing and persecution “in the name of Jesus” or “for the glory of God”? (See the post from yesterday about how the church has tortured people.) A variety of political, social, and theological explanations could be offered, and they might all be valid.…
Warfare and Sickness
Is sickness something we should come against as spiritual warfare or is sickness just something that is part of our life until the Kingdom of God comes? Greg deals with the answer to this question.
Living With a Kingdom Consciousness
What Is the Kingdom of God? I want to begin by asking, “What is the kingdom of God?” This may seem like a rather obvious question. We all know what the Kingdom of God is, right? But see, this is precisely the problem. It’s why (I shall argue) the Kingdom of God is largely absent…
The Way We Disagree Matters
Rachel Held Evans posted her reflections on the ways we interact over differences in Biblical interpretation. It’s an important topic as we live out the kingdom among one another in our polarizing environment. How do you maintain a Christ-like posture when you are attacked or when others question your devotion to Christ when you express…
What God Requires
The reason we were created and what we are called to be is summed up in one word: love. The central defining truth of those who follow Jesus is that in Christ God ascribed unsurpassable worth to us, and thus the central defining mark of those who live in love is that they ascribe the…
Doing the Kingdom, Not Voting It In
Our central job is not to solve the world’s problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging. Perhaps this partly explains why we have allowed ourselves to be so thoroughly co-opted by the world. It’s hard to…