Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

11 Apr

Everyone is Someone’s Child

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Brokenness, Community. Tagged: , , , , .

Someone's Child

How King David Makes Me Mad and Helps Me Explain the Importance of Seeing Others as Gifts

There are things that annoy me and I don’t react well to them and then there are things that bring out a “holy anger.” I taught a Bible study yesterday that brought out that holy anger because the story involved treating human lives as if they were expendable.

I am taking a break from my series on Receiving Others as Gifts to talk about this story. But it is not really a break from the theme of “Others as Gifts” at all because honoring the very life of others—no matter who they are—is a basic premise of receiving them as gifts.

The study was from Gather: the Magazine of Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Gather studies this academic year have been featuring different women in the Bible and this particular study was about a woman named Rizpah and her dramatic mourning over her sons. You can read the story in 2 Samuel 2:1-14.

Why did Rizpah’s two sons die? [WARNING: GORE ALERT!] Well, King David handed them and the five sons of Merab over to Saul’s enemies, the Gibeonites, to be impaled.

Why did David hand them over? Well, there was a famine for three years and David was freaking out. Meanwhile, apparently “the Lord” reminded him about the “bloodguilt” from the time when Saul put Gibeonites to death.

So, David figured if he appeased the Gibeonites then the famine would end. Easy peasy.

And what did the Gibeonites require? At first they behaved as if they couldn’t be appeased. But when David pressed them they suggested this eerily specific idea. David could hand over 7 male descendants (“sons”) of Saul for them to be impaled.

And David agreed!

Right there, my holy anger was already kindled, but that wasn’t what really set me off.

What really set me off was verse 7, “But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Saul’s son Jonathan, because of the oath of the Lord that was between them, between David and Jonathan son of Saul.”

Yes, yes, David was honoring an oath. How noble.

It was, in fact, an oath that he made with his best friend, Jonathan! Are you catching that? It was his best friend’s kid that he spared.
Of course, David would place a value on the life of his best friend’s kid.

But the other 7 that he handed over were expendable. Their lives didn’t matter to David.

And it’s not that he doesn’t know that life matters, because he spared the life of a prime candidate for the Gibeonites’ bizarre execution. David knew that life mattered, but he selectively denied the value of the lives of the seven.

But see, everyone matters. Everyone is someone’s kid! And Rizpah with her dramatic time of mourning over her kids wouldn’t let David ignore the value of all of the lives that he had handed over.

And that brings me to why I’m interrupting my series to write about this—because my whole bit about Receiving Others as Gifts is to remind us that people matter!

All people matter! Even people we don’t like! Even our enemies! Even people we don’t even know!

We don’t get to pick and choose!

The atrocities we’re capable of when we lose site of this are horrifying.

I want to be certain to point out that God never asked for the execution of the seven sons of Saul. That was sheerly the agreement between the Gibeonites and David.

I imagine God out there with Rizpah, wailing and lamenting the senseless loss of life. Because those were not just Rizpah’s sons, they were not just Merab’s sons, they were God’s precious created people.

They matter to God.

We matter to God.

Others matter to God.

I hope and pray that we find in our hearts to let others matter to us–to receive them as gifts.

Read all the posts in the Receiving Others as Gifts series:

9 Apr

What Happens When We Don’t Trust Each Other?

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Brokenness, Community. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Surveillance

I tend to have a rather nuanced view of the human condition, people aren’t all bad and they’re not all good either. Still, I think a basic level of trust is helpful to get along in our world.

I think we need to trust people to make their own decisions about how they live their lives as long as they’re not hurting others. With that, I wrote up a list of nine reasons I think distrust and suspicion create more problems than they solve.

Click the title below to see the whole list at Life & Liberty:

9 Troubling Ways Distrust and Suspicion Ruin Society

7 Apr

My Turn to Receive Service…

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community. Tagged: , , , , , .

Changing Tire

Driving home from errands I got a flat tire…

I knew what to do. I had everything under control, but people kept trying to help me!

I was not just some “damsel in distress.”

Or was I?

My latest podcast for Life & Liberty explores my thoughts and feelings about this experience and what it was like for me to receive service I wasn’t sure I needed.

Click the picture above to go to the podcast.

6 Apr

Can we find a place between obsessive control and total chaos?

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Confusion

 

The idea of problems in life being out of our control is often uncomfortable. And it can be downright scary when we assume that our inability to control the outcomes will lead to all-out chaos.

Sometimes to alleviate our fear of chaos we try to clamp down with obsessive measures of control. But then excessive control creates its own kinds of problems.

 

Which Will it Be?

If you had to pick…would you rather live in a society with obsessive control or total chaos?

Personally, if those were my only choices, I only want the obsessive control if I’m the one doing the controlling. If you’re the one in charge, I like my chaos just fine.

And isn’t that just the thing? I mean, we don’t want things to be out of our control, but we sure don’t want to be under someone else’s control either.

Fortunately, obsessive control and total chaos are not the only options we have. There is a whole range in between these two extremes.

So, how can we loosen our grip without letting everything fall apart?

 

Click the title to read the rest of this essay, Control vs. Chaos, at Life & Liberty Online Magazine

4 Apr

Receiving Others as Gifts: Embracing Their Giftedness

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Giftedness

For as long as I can remember I have had some understanding that different people are, well, different. We don’t all like the same things, we don’t all behave the same ways, and we don’t all have the same ideas. Different people have different gifts and strengths and these should be honored and celebrated, not seen as a threat.

School Days
When I was a kid in school I remember being really jealous when certain select individuals were considered “gifted” and got to go to special “enrichment” classes while the rest of us did our usual routine. I wasn’t the most enthused about school work and admit to often just doing the minimum needed to get by—as smart as I thought I was, I wasn’t exactly “enrichment” material.

As I progressed through elementary school, other kids distinguished themselves in athletic achievements. I, on the other hand was challenged to meet grade level minimum standards on the annual physical fitness achievement test.

Seeing other students excel in ways that teachers recognized and for which awards were given in school often led me to wonder whether I had anything distinguishing or remarkable about myself.

Being Unique

Now, looking back on that time I can see trends of the types of things that I really put myself into whole-heartedly and truly enjoyed. These were creative pursuits of all kinds, a little entrepreneurship, and church-life. And now I’m putting all that together in my writing and speaking ministry!

Whether we get recognition or awards or not, we each have unique gifts. The traits and experiences that set each of us apart make it so that, like snowflakes, no two people are exactly alike. And that’s a good thing!

But sometimes we see our differences as a threat. And this is not altogether unfounded as there are indeed risks inherent in accepting the uniqueness of others.

Measuring Up

Sometimes we feel threatened by the success of another, like I did when other kids went to enrichment classes or got physical fitness awards. Sometimes to minimize this risk we try to be something we’re not. We can get ourselves awfully stuck by measuring ourselves against the strengths of others.

It’s difficult to fully embrace the giftedness of others without also understanding our own giftedness. To that end, there are numerous professional assessments—the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Inventory to name a couple.

I encourage all people to spend some time learning what makes them unique. A book that offers a comprehensive overview is LifeKeys and I highly recommend it.

Leveling

But sometimes the differences of another feel threatening because we cannot predict or control what they will do. To minimize this risk we often try to reduce others down to how they are supposedly “just like us.” We think we can tame the threat they pose by finding what we have in common with them.

Patrick R. Keifert, in his book, Welcoming the Stranger, warns against this leveling of the other. He advocates an understanding of the “irreducible other” arguing that to truly value others we have to let their otherness be what it is.

It is important to be open to the strange and surprising aspects of others. Rather than minimizing differences we do well to embrace them.

Risk Management

The differences among us do not have to be threatening. Gaining clarity about our own strengths helps us feel more secure and less apt to measure ourselves by an impossible standard. And acknowledging that others are never going to be quite like us or within our control can free us up to the ways that they will surprise us. As we navigate these risks we can then more fully embrace the giftedness of others.

Read all the posts in the Receiving Others as Gifts series:

 

Disclaimer: Links in this post will take you to the Amazon store at Life & Liberty Online Magazine where I am on staff as Editor-in-Chief. A portion of your purchase there will benefit our work at Life & Liberty.

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