God's Goodness in the Midst of Crisis
How do you minister God’s goodness to friends or family who are going through difficult times?
"Friends and family are the hardest. I half-jokingly tell people, “You know, a prophet is without honor in his hometown.” We know that, which is why God has all of us learn how to minister at home first, so that we do it without honor or the applause of people. If we can learn to do it without applause, we can be trusted with applause.
"But how do we do it with family and friends? Somehow, we get to a place where familiarity doesn’t change how we pray. We can be over-familiar with the person, which causes us to pray differently, and we end up praying wrong. It would be easy in some situations to pray with accusation instead of praying for mercy. Sometimes when we know the person well, it is easy to find reasons to accuse them, but if we didn’t know them at all, we’d be praying for mercy. "Jesus ministered in Nazareth, and it’s a bizarre story, but “He could do no mighty works there except for a few healings because of their unbelief.” The unbelief was based on familiarity. It’s possible to know Jesus the wrong way, and sometimes we can know the people around us the wrong way until we don’t recognize who they are in God, and we completely miss an opportunity to draw from what God has put in their lives. This can happen when we minister to people, too. The main thing is to serve well."
I had a friend who was going through a bizarre situation with their family and was being accused of the most ridiculous things that are the opposite of who this person is. But if they can weather this without resentment, they will come through with such strength that the family will come to them and feed from them in the years to come. Sometimes we just hold on. We stay faithful and make sure that we love. If we have to protect ourselves, we set boundaries. We don’t have to listen to everything that is said. We aren’t required to allow people to walk on us. We set some boundaries and follow them well for our own well-being, but we love and serve these people. We pray when we get a chance. If there’s a crisis, we pray for them. We pray for them in person if they will allow us to, and if they don’t, we pray at home."
