[491 words]
I am as low as a person can be! There is no one that seems to have an interest in me; I can’t even buy a friend to shovel dirt on me at the time of my anticipated burial. I wait on the Lord, but does He want to give any attention to me. My humiliation is so bad I can walk underneath a pregnant ant with room to spare.
What kind of feeling about yourself do you have? For some, the struggle to feel like you are wanted or accepted is never ending. You always or nearly always feel as if the other person or group of people want nothing to do with you. Perhaps your growing up years were marked by thinking, “I can never do anything right!” Maybe you heard that incessantly, or just enough to start believing it.
You will continue to feel this way if you allow others to control how and what you think about yourself. Deny it if you will, but it is true; when you allow others to control how you feel, you fulfill your own prophecy (so to speak).
Are you a “double-minded man”, as James speak of it (1:8) in such struggles? You are not. James speaks of a person who is confused about the kind of life to live, whether he wants to live in accordance with faithfulness or not (1:6). A double-minded person in the context of James 1 is not a good thing because it’s a struggle no Christian should have. Either he chooses to serve the Lord, or in his confused state of mind he chooses to serve the “god of this world.”
How can a Christian who struggles with thinking anyone accepts him or her not be double-minded? In the context of James, the life one chooses to live in a confused way is a life of confused devotion. The one wondering if any accepts him or her, in the context of which I speak, is not living that kind of life because that person’s devotion is unquestioned. To the Lord they go and they would not think of anyone else to whom they should turn (cf. John 6:68).
The one who struggles is encouraged to remember the Lord has exalted him from the throngs of worldly existence to an high estate (1:9). One translation reads this way: “Let the poor brother of lowly station rejoice in his exalted station as a Christian” (Williams).
This should mean something to us, shouldn’t it? “Ron, you just don’t understand.” Perhaps I don’t. I do understand what the Lord said, however. And if you struggle with feeling so low you can walk underneath a pregnant ant, why would you want to stay there? “I wouldn’t!” you say. If so, let me ask, “Do you know of a better way to approach a new way of thinking than the one you have adopted?”
Ron Thomas
Sunrush church of Christ
Chillicothe, OH