When the crisis hits, you need someone who believes in you. Someone who will be like a rock of confidence. While you are shaky and weak, they are steady and sure.
For that next step in recovery, you have to know someone is there, right beside you. Not to tell you off, chastise you or to add weight to your wounds. But someone who believes in you even if you fail for the 100th time.
Soul Believers take the step across the threshold of unknowing. They hold hands and whisper words to you that cause your heart to hope.
3 Qualities of Soul Believers
1. Soul Believers accept your past
We all have one. A shadow that follows us around that we would instead not look at. We have a history that may at times haunt and engulf us. We try to repress it and force it down but up it comes, bubbling away. Leaking out at times. So we hide away, but on a mask and join fellow actors on the stage of pretense.
Secrets come in all shapes and sizes. Burdens carried that sculpt our thinking into behavioral patterns of hiddenness. But who will seek out the mysteries of one’s soul? Not many as it is a journey into a dark cavern of unknowing and inadequacy. Where we can’t be in control of the outcome.
Soul Believers know that you have a past because they have explored their own history and have learned to sow seeds of grace into it. They have discovered that no one is immune to pain and failure.
They accept you, past and all.[pullquote]I only preach from my scars, not my wounds. Nadia Bolz-Weber[/pullquote]
In various ways, they express that nothing you have done or that has been done to you will affect their tender love towards you.
This shocks you, could it be true? You take a cautious step forward and discover hope. You find out that they too have also been wounded. The wounds have healed and are now scars, reminders of past skirmishes of the soul.
Soul Believers have scars and are willing for you to touch them and ask questions. Remember how Jesus invited Thomas to place his fingers in his wounds? Soul believers express personal vulnerability.
2. Soul Believers engage with your present
It’s not all a ‘pondering over the past,’ it’s also a connecting with your present reality. Food parcels, housing issues, child care, transport. How can we problem solve these day to day life issues together?
Soul believers know that you face struggles in your everyday life. This present reality of bills to pay and meals to make is an invitation to learn and grow in new skills and wisdom. To discover God midst the washing of pots and pans, just as Brother Lawrence did.
The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way we look at them – through faith or unbelief – that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good. Brother Lawrence
Soul Believers point us to the presence of Christ amidst the trials.
3. Soul Believers envision your future
They not only accept your past and engage with the present, but they also have a belief that there is a beautiful ‘God rich’ future ahead of you. Mountains look most formidable at the bottom. Soul believers help you take one step at a time because they see the mountain as moments of transformation.[pullquote]A vision we give to others of who and what they could become has power when it echoes what the spirit has already spoken into their souls. Larry Crabb[/pullquote]
Perhaps they have been this route themselves and now, walking beside you, they hold out a candle into the darkness of the night.
Perhaps they have crafted a vision letter, something that has been stirred up in their soul by the Spirit of God. Not a wish list of dreams, but of what is possible when the heart is wholly given over to the Narrow Path experience of walking Gods way.
Is being a Soul Believer easy?
No, and never. It can be torturous and painful at times. It’s not for the faint of heart and for those who like simple ‘band-aid’ solutions.
There are times when I gladly walk on past the dehumanized man, beaten and stripped naked in the ditch that Jesus described in the message of the Good Samaritan.
I have to.
Perhaps Christ does not call me to attend to every wounded soul, but to the ones that he knows I and I alone can be a Soul Believer for.
So in this, there is a perilous invitation to being attentive to hear his whisper of invitation. ‘This one is for you.’
To love is not to wish good for another person, it is to bear another’s burden; that is, to bear what is painful to you and which you do not bear willingly. Dr Larry Crabb
Question to Consider
Who has believed in you? What qualities did they demonstrate?
Barry Pearman
Photo Credit: marfis75 via Compfight cc
Barry is a writer, coach, and course creator that has a passion for Mental Health and Spiritual Formation.
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