Maybe the best way to heal from my pain is entering into someone else's

​Times are really different. In my 56 years of living, this morning I live as worried about our country and the direction we're going as I've ever been. I say that with a hurting heart more than a fearful one.

We're dealing with an unknown virus that's taken over 100,000 lives in just a couple of months. We have more people out of work than have been out of work in decades. We have more people than ever in our history taking their own lives through suicide and drug overdoses. And across the country people are rioting and burning down cities to protest injustice.

I say all the time we all have two things in common. We all hurt and we all refuse to hurt. I would argue almost every action we take in life is to deal with the hurt we've experienced or the hurt we're trying to avoid. Either way, we are all one way or another saying I refuse to hurt.

I think the struggle with that reality is that for far too long we've all been consumed with our own hurt. We've all been far too busy soothing our own pain or working to avoid or delay our own hurt that we've failed to notice the rest of the universe is in the same boat.

We've failied to come to understand a beautiful world isn't one without pain, a beautiful world is one that gets absorbed in the pain of others. We've failed to come to understand that healing isn't the absence of pain in my life, healing comes from the devotion to healing the pain in someone else's life.

I am a Christian. I follow the teachings of Jesus. I long for his life to come fully alive inside of me. To date I've come up woefully short of living like he is. But in desiring it, I have to acknowledge the New Testament is all about Jesus going into the pain of the marginalized and the oppressed. In the end, Jesus died on a cross saying this is about me understanding your pain, your pain today and tomorrow and forever. This is not about me caught up in my own suffering.

Me and you, whether we believe in Jesus or not, we've both fallen, at least to some degree, for the trap of blaming.

Blaming is easy. It requires little understanding of anyone else. Blaming says this is your fault not mine. Blaming says your responsible for my pain or for your own pain or both. Blaming assigns responsibility for pain without having to express any desire or willingness to bring healing to it. Blame says I have all the answers I need about this. Blame says I'm the only one who could possibly have those answers.

Blame says I'm far more interested in you being held accountable for your actions than I am in understanding and healing the hurt that may be connected to them.

Well, Jesus spent his life modeling others care and not self care. The key evidence is how much time he spent understanding and not blaming.

I always find it interesting that if you go through the bible, God tried getting us to love and understand one another from afar. At some point he acknowledged this distance loving thing isn't working out so well, so I'm going to go physically enter into their pain. I'm going to go physically be a part of their healing.

I'm going to go pysically enter their lives to say I'm hear to tell you I understand you, I'm not here to blame you.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I think there is value in that story. Because it's our story. More than any time in my life, I see us trying to dictate and judge and encourage our idea of love from a distance. Often from behind a screen.

Maybe it's time to not be so distant. Maybe it's time to go enter lives, leave our own pain behind for a few minutes and ask someone to tell us about theirs.

The biggest threat to us is not unemployment or a virus or looting. The threat that has me more concerned about life this morning than I think I've ever been isn't the painful things I see going on in the world. It's our thirst for assigning blame for those things at the expense of wanting to fully understand the pain beneath them all.

We've become far more consumed with finding out who is responsible for all the pain instead of simply asking someone why they are hurting.

Because trust me, we all are. And one way or another, we all refuse to.