Alone at Night in a Losing Battle

Chances are there's a very private part of your life, a secret part, a secret struggle. It's there putting distance between you and others, making it hard for you to be fully honest with others and certainty making it hard for you to trust. In the Elton John song Recover Your Soul, he sings of being, "Alone at night in a losing battle." All sorts of people are, including many churchgoers. 

In Twelve Step programs, it is said: "We're as sick as the secrets we keep." Secrets fester in the dark. They breed fear and suspicion. They destroy trust, and they destroy community. We all need a place, a space, a gathering, where we can be ourselves, fully ourselves. It was this that the biblical writer James addressed when he urged us to confess our sins to each other and pray for each other so that we may be healed (James 5:16). He asks me to sit down and tell you - tell someone, some Christian brother or sister ~ the real deal in my fife, what my real struggles are. So if I had a problem with lust I'd tell you. If I had a problem with alcohol, or marijuana, or anger I'd tell you, and we'd pray about it. If I was so depressed I could barely get up in the morning I'd tell you.

I note two things about the text. First, the text supposes a relationship between confessing sins and being healed. It suggests that there is a powerful body-mind connection, and of course in our generation more and more medical practitioners will grant the healing power of forgiveness, of trust, and of unconditional love. Forgiveness is physiological. Trust is physiological. Love is physiological. And of course confessing sins which draws upon and in turn stimulates all these qualities is physiological.

The second thing I notice is what your primary responsibility is when you hear another's confession. Say a person comes to you and shares their deepest darkest shame; what is your responsibility from this text? If s not to judge them. It's not to preach to them. It's not even to say something wise or insightful or therapeutic to them. Instead it's to pray for each other. It’s to talk about it with God, call on his name, give it up to him. If s to pray that God will fill us, heal us, free us, and then to thank him for the filling, healing, and freeing you know he's doing, because that's what God does.

Pretty simple stuff. Pretty basic. Except it's not done much anymore except in Catholic circles, and sometimes pretty mechanically there.  I suppose there are a number of reasons we don't do it, starting with: We realty underestimate sin. We really underestimate the destructive, addictive, polluting, mutilating power of sin. We're so used to feeling bad we think if s normal. Sin twists us up, clouds our thinking, saps our energy, and depresses us (that's why God hates it), but if s been that way for so long we think it's the way we're supposed to be.

Primarily, however, we don't do it because of fear, the fear that when we really open up what we say wit) not be received with discretion, or perspective, or mercy, or grace. A cloud of judgment hangs so heavily in v   many churches and has hung there for so long that no one dares really to confess anything; it seems better to be atone at night in a losing battle.

I'm going to ask you, dear reader, if you conduct yourself in a way that would encourage anyone to confess anything to you? And if the answer is, No, I'm going to ask you to change, because Jesus still hasn't gotten through to an important part of you. The problem may be that the church ts too often misunderstood as a community of saints (made saints by their own merits and achievements) when realistically it's a fellowship of sinners (justified by God), a Sinners Anonymous. The truth is that if you attend church and you're not a sinner, you're crashing the party. Jesus came for sinners, not for the righteous (Matt. 9:13).

The time is past for churches to be filled with people who outwardly look just fine but inwardly are crying out for someone to understand, love, and support them just as they are — confused, frustrated, and terribly frightened. The time is past for churches to be filled with people who look and sound pure but inwardly are sick of themselves, sick of their weakness, and sick of the lack of reality around them even in the church. Somewhere in some way every one must have a place where they no longer feel all alone at night in a losing battle, a place where for the first time they can begin to believe they can really be forgiven, a place where they are allowed to process their fear, grief, and depression, a place where they can begin to have true and honest relationships with others and with God. I think that place should be the church, don't you?

There has to be a place in your life where you can feel completely at home and be fully yourself, a place where you can unwind and express yourself freely and share your deepest fears, sins, struggles, shames, and embarrassments. Why not the church? In fact, God intends his church to be exactly the place where alt this happens. Moreover, I don't think if s optional - something to do after we've got all the other stuff, all the doctrine and practice, right It's worth every effort, every . experiment — trying this, trying that — learning again after so many centuries of human loneliness to confess our sins to each other and pray for each other so we can be healed. When we have each other, none of us should ever be "alone at night in a losing battle." Are you?

Hazlewood Church of Christ