Division

DAILY BYTE

Yesterday, we reflected on the divisiveness of sweetly smoothing over the truth. Obviously, there are helpful and unhelpful ways of speaking and hearing truth... The opposite of bland niceness is not meanness and judgment. That leads us to the second cause of division.

A few weeks ago, I was traveling with a group around South Africa, and we met a woman whom I will call Esther. But unlike Queen Esther of the scriptures, this Esther lives by herself with her son, who is about eight years old in a one-room shack. All fifteen of us crowded into her tiny room, while she sat dignified on her bed, holding her son in her lap. The minister with us calmly asked her to tell us a little of her story. She was a beautiful woman with proud eyes, but the fire in them diminished, as she shared her life. She had been married, and her son became very, very sick. She went to the doctor and discovered that he had HIV and TB and was on the brink of death. Do you know anyone whose story sounds like this?

The doctor asked if he could test her to see if she had it, too, and she did. She hadn't known that her husband was HIV positive. He hadn't told her, and the unspoken truth almost killed her and her son. And not only that, but when her husband found out, he left, which is what we do when we want to avoid the truth, is it not? She found herself completely alone. Her family turned their backs on her. They cowered away in judgment of her condition and the possible choices she had made in her life that brought her to that place.

We divide ourselves from one another in relationships and as the church when we stubbornly defend our own position, allowing no room for listening or compromise. We divide ourselves from the people we love and people we barely know when we allow our hearts to harden in judgment instead of opening them to discern where Jesus and the truth of the Gospel are in their life.

Divisions brought about by niceness and by judgment are both tragic. Perhaps, they are some of the dividing walls that Paul speaks about in Ephesians - so prevalent in our lives that we act as though these are the kinds of division that the Gospel of Luke talks about Jesus bringing. As relationships come apart, the church continues to splinter into pieces, and the world dukes out its judgment in war, we act as though these are the only ways we know how to operate.

Do you operate with these kinds of division in your life? Do you desire to live a different way?

GUIDING SCRIPTURE

Ephesians 2:14 (NRSV)

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Lord, open my eyes to dividing walls that I put up between myself and others. Help me to break them down humbly and graciously so that I become a part of Your healing and reconciliation in the world. Amen.