Helping the Helper
I have watched pastors exhaust themselves on an individual that ultimately hurts others in the congregation. I have watched volunteers put themselves needlessly in harm's way to save a poor soul. I have seen organizations waste resources for years on people that are not getting any better and have no intention of changing.
The realization that helping others can be hard is oftentimes what holds back an otherwise willing aid. Deciding how, and when, and in what way a person is to be helped is stressful. It requires wisdom, maturity and strength of character. It also requires a level of purity that I don’t think many realize is a necessity.
That is why Yeshua says, “Be as pure as doves and as shrewd as vipers.”
I have seen scheming individuals victimize a volunteer using their own weakness and unhealed trauma (oftentimes the very reason why they are so desperate to offer aid to others). It has amazed me that, more often than not, the most wounded and hurt individuals walk out into the minefield of some of the darkest projects, drug communities, emotional and mental abuse victims, human trafficking, domestic violence cases, all with little-to-no personal healing. It is true that victims often strive to be helpers in order to prevent others from going through the same trauma. However, they often set themselves up for further victimization because they never really learned to stop the abuse in the first place.
Another way in which people can find themselves in a bad spot is to be easily drawn into someone else's problems when they have not addressed their own sins. I see this more often in pastors and counselors. They are struggling with some secret sin, or at least they think it is secret. But the enemy is not an idiot and can smell our rotting fleshly desires a mile away. I have seen him pair a situation or a person with the perfect candidate. It doesn’t take long for the stinking rot of one person's problems to feed into another's, or into just the right situation. Thus, an affair is born, or money laundering, or gossip, or so on and so forth. I think you get the ugly picture. I am, and forever will be, a huge proponent of the “clean your own house first” philosophy, lest every mistake make itself manifest in your weakest moments. And you better believe, if you are in the ministry in any capacity you will be rendered weak, often.
Thus the “pure as doves” part comes into play. If there is nothing to manipulate or blackmail, then there is little to work with. So, before you go off and start a church, or become a Sunday school teacher, or volunteer at a homeless shelter, check your own struggles. Are you actively working on your own problems? Are you actively healing through your own trauma before you put yourself in a dangerous situation?
It has absolutely disheartened me to see and hear the number of pastors that have fallen, small group leaders that have set HORRID examples, community leaders caught. Please don’t be another one.
The second part is just as important, and in many ways is an acquired skill. You have to know what defeat looks like, smells like, and how it interacts with others. It can take time to really learn how to tell the difference between a person that truly wants help and one that doesn’t. It can be even harder to find the balance between setting appropriate boundaries to prevent predators from coming in among the prey, and making it too difficult for those that truly need help to get it.
I spent a short stint working for a help center in central Texas. I can tell you that a great many of the people that were there really had no desire to change their lifestyle…but a few did. They were willing to work to get themselves out of trouble, but oftentimes it came with having to make difficult decisions like giving up friends and family that were supporting or enforcing bad habits. Sometimes it was a person that was being victimized and just didn’t know where to go. But I can tell you that there was one person in particular that was there from the beginning that was a wolf for sure. He was friendly for the most part. He was also cunning. He was a drug dealer and I’m not sure there was a more profitable location than at that spot. He could sit there surrounded by people coming off a fix and was ready and willing to supply. He was dangerous and should have been sent on his way a long time ago. But I know for a fact that he is still there and his influence over the area is just as strong today, if not stronger.
There should have been a boundary. There should have been courage enough to tell him to leave, but there wasn’t. Perhaps he might have been helped, if indeed he could be, by someone telling him to leave. He might have been encouraged by someone willing to stand up to him. Perhaps not, but either way, keeping quiet and allowing such things to go on was one of the biggest reasons that the hard work that went on there and still goes on by a wonderful group of volunteers, is often rendered useless.
God called us to be kind and merciful. He did not call us to be victims. He did not suffer fools and he did not call us to suffer them, either. We are to stand up to what is wrong, even when it comes in the form of helplessness.
All of this is a challenge. But it is not an excuse for NOT helping. I’ve seen many people pull back and step aside from doing the work we were called to do because they were unwilling to take on the challenge that lay before them. It was too hard and they did not want to go through the required personal growth in order to walk the path of service. I will tell you that it is better to have set out on a path and struggled, suffered, and failed, than to have not set out on the path at all. God will not honor a coward any more than he will honor a willful sinner.
Yes, we must help. But first we must be willing to grow, learn, and heal. Before we help, we need to be helped.
.png)
Comments
Post a Comment