Passionate ranting and sobering questions

We ran into a wonderful, godly man the other day. We had a moment to catch up, and he and my husband shared with each other some of the devastated lives they encountered in their work and ministry. As we unwound these broken situations, we looked behind the actions and considered where the cracks in their lives started; the young addict whose mother had shown him how to shoot up heroin, the 27-year-old man who was shown pornography as a 6-year-old boy on the playground at school, the suicidal young woman whose father walked out many years before...

As we spoke, questions arose. Questions like:
“Is there even hope to restore a life so broken?”
“Can someone emotionally and mentally come back from a place like that when they’ve never been equipped with the tools to cope?”
“Even if they’re freed from their addiction, could they live a normal life?”

To which I, perhaps annoyingly (at first), answered, “But we get to bring Jesus!”

We get to bring Jesus! The hope for a life broken beyond human repair; the hope for someone ill-equipped during their developmental years to live a purposeful life; the hope for redeeming the lost innocence of a child...that hope it Jesus. After my 3rd or 4th, “But Jesus,” we started to talk about Jesus. We talked about the power of Jesus to free; and not just to free, but to restore; and not just to restore, but to build up to bring freedom and restoration to others. Because Jesus’ healing power is thorough and amazingly beautiful to behold. We talked about how we don’t have to know the answer to details of the brokenness, we just need to love with the persevering, steadfast, redeeming love of Jesus poured out; how that love redeems the lives of the ones it lands on. We talked about how watching this process is “the greater thing” that Jesus told us we will see (He raised the dead, there’s no way you can get a bigger physical miracle than that), He was talking about us bringing His healing, redemptive, life-transforming love on the cross to a broken world and watching its power land upon needy souls bringing pure beauty from the ashes of the aftermath of sin.

Because THAT is what we bring when we answer the brokenness of the world with a relationship with Jesus. Scripture says we are “Ambassadors of Hope.” That fact should make our hearts leap; it should cause our feet to run into the darkness because the Light we carry has the power not just to dispel it...but to heal all that has been broken there.

Jesus is beautiful and He is enough!

And at the end of our conversation, the man was brimming with encouragement and he asked me,
“Have you told anyone this?”

And I can’t shake this question...”Have you told anyone this?” 

I can’t shake it because he wasn’t asking me if I had told the lost, the bound, the weary in the broken world, he was asking me if I had told the Church.

I can’t shake this question. I can’t shake it, not because I don’t tell anyone who will listen to my passionate rants, but because my answer is simple. It is simple, yet so sobering I tear up every time it comes to mind:
“I thought they knew.”