Maladjusted

We are excited to introduce Dr. Matt Farlow and share with you his blog post! He has a background in both pastoral work and higher education and he is currently the Executive Director of the newly incorporated LoveINC of East Multnomah County!

We hope you enjoy his thoughts!

Also, be in prayer as their affiliate opens their call center for the first time this week!

By Matt Farlow

When stepping into the truth of poverty and mental health one is confronted with the tragic reality of lack. Not, however, a lack of resources, but of compassion. Our lack of understanding poverty and the toll it takes is tied directly to our lack of compassion for our neighbor.

Followers of Christ are invited into more than “acts of charity” that take the form of being nice—we meet a need and are released to retreat. Christ calls us not to simply meet needs, but to be present. To be a neighbor.

As followers of Christ, we are given the high calling of neighbor. In an article written nearly 20 years ago, Rudy Carrasco asks a question that not only resonates with the reality of the Pacific Northwest today, but strikes against the clanging cymbals of so many Christians:

When did you last spend time with a poor person, an at-risk individual, or someone in need? When was the last time you were close to them for an extended period? I ask, because that’s what Jesus did… He did this first by becoming incarnate, one of us…. When working for justice, it is crucial to have personal proximity to injustice.¹

It is easy to become indifferent to others’ mental health and their sufferings when we separate ourselves by our relative comfort surrounded by modern-day conveniences. It is also easy to discount and become indifferent to our own health when a prosperity gospel culture of celebration and happiness surrounds us. To be a neighbor cuts against the grain of culture as it seeks not to console the other, but to become compassion for the sake of the other.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.²

Atticus Finch illumines the truth of becoming compassion. To become compassion is to Love In the Name of Christ. It is to step inside the heart, the life of the one in front of me—to suffer on their behalf, cry for their pain, rejoice in their excitement, hurt for their inner turmoil. It means to be with them in their suffering –to be there for them with a passionate love that is rooted in the Passion of the Christ.

To be with my neighbor is to enter into the personal proximity of my neighbor so I might begin to love them in the name of Christ. And this happens through prayer.

Prayer purifies our hearts, our minds, our souls so that we might first see the other in order to be there for the other. When we are blind to those around us, we miss out on the opportunities to Love in the name of Christ.

“Therefore pray earnestly…”

To know how to enter into my neighbor’s personal proximity, I must first understand their space, their truth; our neighbor will not care about what we know until they know that we care. When we risk immersing ourselves in the Holy Spirit, we are taken deep into the heart of Christ so to be pushed into Jesus’ radical love that seeks to compassionately transform the ways of the world through the ways of an active love.

Followers of Christ should be the first to step into the spaces neglected by society so as to embrace the people—our neighbors—that this world subtly erases. The Church today must, as Dr King illumined, be maladjusted. We must not be comfortable becoming adjusted to this world. Followers of Christ should seek to be:

Men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos who, in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,’ … As maladjusted as Jesus Christ who could say that “he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword.³

It is through our maladjustedness that the Spirit continues to stretch our souls – to expand our heart’s vision and our ministerial reach so that we might enter into the personal proximity of my neighbor and Love them In the Name of Christ.

¹Some Habits of Highly Effective Justice Workers”, by Rodolpho Carrasco, Christianity Today, February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2, Page 46.

²Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (Philadelphia: Harper & Row, 1960), 30.

³Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ohio Northern University, 1/11/68.