Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

With what shall I come before the Lord
    and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

• Micah 6:6-8

“Treat people fairly.  Love others faithfully.  Be careful in your living life”

• My wife’s paraphrase of the last verse of the Scripture above (2009)

My wife turned acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God into what she was very good at doing already, being nice and friendly to everyone you meet, and it seemed she never met a stranger.  Within a few minutes of talking, she would know your birthday (and never forget it) and all the names of the people in your immediate family.  And I would hear the same conversation and I had no idea those things came up in the conversation.  Her listening skills were honed by her wanting to love others faithfully.

This is my third installment of looking more at my wife’s answers to questions rather than studying a First Place 4health Bible Study Guide, begin with Christ.  She took this Bible study in 2009.  She had dedicated her life to Jesus in 2000, and it seemed due to her age, maybe, she prepared to go home to Jesus ever since that time.

The book, published by “first place,” talks about this portion of Micah being instructional, practical.  We should have the ability, even in our broken, sinful state to at least get close to this goal.  Really, acting justly is like loving your neighbor.  Loving mercy means showing mercy when someone wrongs you, not loving the mercy that they show you when you do wrong.  All of that could be summed by saying “be nice to people.”

And that described my wife.  She was nice, and she attracted people as if there was a magnetic field around her.  I cannot count all the people that said when they came to the church the first time that what had them come back a second time was my wife’s smile.

But there is a dark side to her niceness.

“I’ve slacked some, but I know God will forgive me.  I do have a tendency to be kinder to others than to myself – (some of that is cultural).
…
“I show mercy to myself by eating properly and by trying to live according to how God wants me to live.  I’m very hard and sometimes very unforgiving to myself.”

• My wife’s inner thoughts about taking care of herself

When do you turn off the “nice machine”?  Sometimes, she was gruff with me.  I have seen her be bubbly and loving to 30-40 total strangers and then when we get home, she barks instructions like a drill sergeant.  Not because she wants to be mean to me, but because those hours with those strangers meant helping others when she really had no energy in which to be the one doing the helping.  Whether it was adrenaline or this inner desire to never be a burden to the other person, she would get home and I would have to rub half her body in one kind of balm or another.  Then once everything was warmth and tingles, the pain in the muscles would subside, but there still was no energy left.  I would then bring her something to eat and for the last year before she passed away, a tall glass filled with ice, from a soft ice maker.  Instead of drinking her meager water intake for kidney failure patients, she loved sucking on an ice cube, it gave her something to do and it prolonged the moisture in her mouth.

I do not think the prophet meant it to that extreme, but if God sent His Son to die on a cross, it would not kill us to sacrificially be nice to 30-40 total strangers for a couple of hours, especially if you have someone who can rub you down afterwards.  She would even return the favor and rub me down, maybe once a month, between the shoulder blades down to the small of the back.  Maybe that time, that once each month, she reserved just enough energy to do that.

When asked why she might snack a little, she said:  “I’m usually distracted by something or someone and don’t think or meditate on what I’m really supposed to do (eating absently).”

Or maybe absent mindedly?

“Sometimes I get angry with myself and even wonder why God resides in my (messy temple.)
…
“My priority is to be watchful in everything I do (eating, being kind, loving others).”

• My wife, as she digs deeper

My wife in a nutshell, being kind and loving others.  There are a couple of songs about loving God, loving each other.  They might have easily been her theme song.

Can we do it?  Yes, we can.

Can we go to the point of being nice sacrificially?  We can, but it takes a toll.  Jesus said from the cross for His Father to forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing.  Steven said similar words while being stoned to death.  We may not have to die in the process of being nice to our neighbor, but to be nice to the point of having to be rubbed down afterwards?

That is showing love for your neighbor.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.