Confessions About My Emotional Hard Drive

Lacking Emotion About Those in Pain?

I’ve had to work at keeping fresh emotionally about the plight of the Haitians and their trauma following the January 12 earthquake, and then the aftershock quake. Our family has prayed, my wife and I have prayed, and we prayed in earnest, but I am concerned—has the fact of hearing of another catastrophic event of overwhelming tragedy badly affected me? How many fires, hurricanes and tsunamis, and how many stories from Iraq, Afghanistan and Ft. Hood, Texas can the hard drive of human emotion take? I’m a pastor; I’m supposed to have a second hand nature of a spongy heart.

Do I have SND? Shocking News Dysfunction.

I have gone to web sties to view the Port au Prince pictures, and I’ve listened to the radio catching the stories of the raw circumstances and the ones about hope. Christian missionary reports abound too.

Why at times the difficulty of entering the world’s pain?

I cite a few possible answers about this difficulty. Sumpter, watch your doctrine and your life on this stuff, do not be deceived:

●Love includes emotions, but it is more than an emotion. Your ability to enter into the Haitian pain or the house-fire family devastation in Mississippi with deep, heart-felt emotional empathy is not the dominant standard by which to measure love. Love is a four letter word: G-I-V-E. Sometimes love is known apart from heart-tugs and compassion-vibrations. Sometimes. You don’t have to be on an emotional float in the parade to show love, to show care. Practice giving. Practice that kind of care right now, right here in Grants Pass. Emotions come and go; they are not the sure-trust, unfailing way to know and practice love.

●Enter into the usefulness of prayer. Has your callous spirit, Sumpter, overtaken you because you think you’re helpless? Are you lacking emotional sensitivity because you think, I can’t do anything about the situation anyway, so move on; don’t concern yourself with what’s happened 4,000-5,000 miles away. You are not helpless; you are not without an ability to help. How? Get on your knees and pray. That’s the most important help you can demonstrate. Man may feel helpless by distance; God is not hindered by distance. Psalm 139. He is there! The apostle Paul asked for prayer from the Colossians, in Asia Minor, while he’s miles and miles away in Rome or Caesarea in prison.

●Don’t neglect the practical acts of care today. Don’t neglect people. Are you so tuned into protecting your projects, driving on ahead to get to your own destination that you walk on the other side of the road of those stranded and in the ditch of life? Yesterday, I was heading out of the local hospital. I was heading out, going home. A very typical Southern Oregon man—ball cap, facial hair, probably 7 hunting magazines on his truck dashboard—looked at me a little longer than usual. I knew he wanted to talk. I didn’t know him from Adam. Yes, sure enough, he wanted to talk. His girlfriend is likely faced with serious issues. I was heading out; he needed a pair of human ears at that moment. Stopping to listen was the mandate. There were no spiritual hoochies and feelgoods at that moment. I need to practice entering into human pain today. People always, always need encouragement.

I have the tendency to get gushy and sentimental. I am still learning to grow up. I want emotion, yes; but I also want to be a Christian about tragedy, pain and real-to-life people faced with real-to-life devastation.

G. Mark Sumpter

I'll Never Fall in Love Again?

“We must recover the Protestant confidence in the comprehensibility of this world. Rather than pursuing superstitious worldviews that focus on cosmic battles between demons and angels, we should regain our love affair with the material world of God's creation--not in the sense of replacing our hope for heaven with a satisfaction with earth, but in the realization that the entire focus of Christianity and its biblical text is the unfolding of God's purposes right here in this world, in real human history.”

From Michael Horton's chapter, “Christianity and Modern Science: Can't We Be Friends?,” found in Where in the World is the Church, p. 135

G. Mark Sumpter

Sharpen Your Iron, Boys

“All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.

Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from it wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God's excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself.”

John Calvin in his Commentary on the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, pp. 300-301. Compare also his Institutes of Christian Religion, Book II, 2:15.

I thought this Calvin fella was the Genevan stuff shirt, that old and crotchety pastor who wears the dark suit and never smiles. You know, the depravity guy who tells us that each one of us has enough dynamite of sin in the heart to blow up the world three times over.

G. Mark Sumpter