Purposeful Rest

For some reason, I've felt drawn away from this blog for a time here, but now it seems time to return to it.

June 8, 2005
That approval thing comes up again--this time not in experience of the Word, but in life circumstance. 

Yesterday at the park, I had an experience that proved to be a rare opportunity to be "Christ" for someone needy.  We were at the "spray ground" which is a cement playground with many fountains and water play options, minus pools.  I was sunning on a bench while my kids played.  Idly, I noticed that on the next bench a very heavy woman sat with her two children.  One was two and a half or three years old and the other was maybe four months old.  The mom had a cheap little stroller for the big girl and carried the infant in her arms.  Both kids appeared to be at least mildly retarded--or maybe the older one was autistic, I don't really know, they were awfully young and I'm no diagnostician.  In any case, the older girl couldn't communicate verbally although she was sufficiently mobile.  Still, she was playing happily enough, and so the mom carried the baby here and there while the bigger child ran around playing. 

I didn't pay attention to them for a while--there were many kids playing in the water, and there were mine to tend--but suddenly, an older, obviously wealthy couple came up to the play area and began shouting, "Whose little girl is this?" 

Evidently, a child had crawled over the grassy hill and to the road--in fact was nearly in the road.  This couple coaxed her to crawl back--her legs were caked in mud.  The well-groomed older woman in her heels and jewels wouldn't pick the child up and carry her, so we waited for the little girl to crawl back over the hill as they herded her, and we realized she was the heavy woman's older daughter.  Quickly, someone had found the mother and brought her over.  The rich woman said she was going to call the police because letting a child crawl to the road was surely a form of child abuse. (But making a child crawl back wasn't!?!)  They screamed these things loud enough that everyone at the sprayground simply stared in silence--not so much awkward as stunned.  This sort of thing never happened at this nice suburban playground.  The couple stormed off before the mother collected her wits enough to say anything in return--supposedly they returned to the car they'd parked when they saw the child and decided to stop and intervene.

For a moment, the mother tried to wrestle with both kids as the older girl began making almost feral screaming cries.  I went over then and offered to hold the infant while she dealt with the crying girl.  She thanked me, and I held the new baby--he could hold his head up some, but could barely focus both eyes on me as I rocked him in my arms--meanwhile she calmed the older girl, put her shoes on her and got her settled in her stroller.  The mom was shaking like a leaf the whole time.  Another young pretty mother tried to reassure her that the man and woman were "way out of line" in the way they interacted with her--they were just scared and didn't know what to do.  But the mother burst into tears and quickly left in fear.

I've thought about the incident a lot today.  I've come to the conclusion that the older couple did not act out of compassion, even if they did keep the child from being hit by a car.  They wouldn't touch her, and they were screaming before they even got over the hill.  They were simply motivated by fear and powerlessness.  Saving the child was merely incidental.  In the end, insensitive cruelty and self-righteous indignation ruined any honor they might have earned with their rescue of the child.

I see that attitude so many places.  Pity for those less fortunate than ourselves is rapidly being crushed by our need to have power and to feel affirmed in our privilege to react with outrage.  Looking back, I fear my own shock and dismay paralyzed me; I feel like I did too little for this poor beaten-down mother. 

O, Lord...send laborers into the field who won't destroy the harvest in the very act of reaping!

I see now why I had to wait until today to post again.  This memory was not meant to be revisited until I confessed something to God:  I am not as strong as I like to think I am.  I am needy, too; and I can't short-change my own need to receive care just because I desire to reach out a helping hand to others.  Why do I want to help anyway?  If I don't accept seasons of rest along the way, my desire to help is polluted with self-importance and a false sense of infallibility.  If I don't sit and rest at Your feet, I am in no better position to be eternally effective than this harsh couple who appalled me years ago. 

I can't under-prioritize what I need from God even as I over-prioritize what others need from me.   False urgency may beg me to follow this disastrous path, but I know better, and must turn instead to follow this now overgrown foot trail. In the last week or so, I've felt it in my heart, anguished over defining it in my mind and now today I get a vision of what might even yet occur if I don't heed the lesson I'm meant to learn.  Sometimes the greatest discipline is letting another take the scythe in hand and head for the field.  Time to let my eyes be drawn away from the harvest for a time; allow myself to see what else is happening here.

God's timing is surely exquisite!