Undone

I have come face to face with how messed up people can be, and I'm freaking out.

I have read an anonymous first-person account of abuse. Sustained abuse. Matter-of-fact descriptions that made me want to throw up.

I'm scared. Of what people are capable of - what I'm capable of - when God's values aren't in place.

I'm scared of what we might become when we're not moving toward holiness.

I'm scared of what life's been like for this person. Of the horror, the burden, the gnawing...

I'm scared that healing can't take place because no one knows anything's broken.

I'm scared that I will be the pastor of a church where people could come and go and I might never even have a clue of what someone might need, because I did not create environments condusive to finding out, to asking people hard questions with enough love that they understood they could be honest and start to confront the hard answers.

I'm scared that I might get so caught up in something else, I wouldn't see these people coming. Or that I wouldn't have any real desire for them to come.

Would someone remind me again how we got to this place? And what we have to do to set a different trajectory for life in Christ?

'Cause right now, I'm scared out of my mind.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
- The Bible, Matthew 23:23