Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

For I endure scorn for your sake,
    and shame covers my face.
I am a foreigner to my own family,
    a stranger to my own mother’s children;
for zeal for your house consumes me,
    and the insults of those who insult you fall on me.

• Psalm 69:7-9

“Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.

• Matthew 10:32-33

“The cross is not misfortune and hard fate. It is instead the suffering that comes to us from being bound to Jesus Christ. The cross is not accidental, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering bound up with natural existence, but suffering bound up with being a Christian. The cross is essentially not just suffering but suffering and being rejected-and also, strictly speaking, being rejected for Jesus Christ’s sake, not because of some other kind of behavior or confession. A Christianity that no longer took discipleship seriously, that made of the gospel only a cheap consolation of faith and for which, otherwise, natural and Christian existence were indistinguishably mixed, would have to understand the cross as daily misfortune, as the urgency and anxiety of our natural life.  To be cast out in suffering, to be despised and abandoned by people, as is the unending lament of the psalmist (Ps. 69:7-8), this essential mark of the suffering of the cross can no longer be comprehended by a Christianity that does not know how to distinguish ordinary and Christian existence. The cross means suffering along with Christ.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live These Days with You (devotion for March 7, devotions compiled from his writings)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer must have been listening to some of my conversations with people who claim a faith in Christ.  The worst thing that ever happened to them is they got a hangnail, and they suffered a lot.  Or nothing ever happened to them in a negative way, but they suffered when their grandparents died of cancer.

Three of my four grandparents died of cancer, or cancer-related issues, but I did not have to carry my cross for them to do so.  It was a natural progression, and when someone has been suffering a long time, the rest of the family is relieved when they are gone.  They never will say it in those terms.  They will respond by saying that they are in a better place or they suffer no more.

We say that we avoid sharing our faith because we might offend someone.  But the truth is that we hate rejection.  We fear the punch in the nose.  We might lose our job (which is a real thing these days in the USA).

But are we not rejecting God?  I was never fired for sharing my faith, but I was passed over for pay raises, where new employees got paid 20% more than I got paid when I had nearly twenty years of experience and taught the new employees how to do their job.  They did not fire me because they would never get another employee to be willing to be paid that little and still do high quality work.  Why else would they trust me train the next generation of employees at a wide variety of job positions?

But I feel embarrassed compared to the people who have gone into war-torn areas of the world.  I heard a missionary talk about how she took out a map.  They plotted on the map where terrorism deaths were at their highest and the Gospel of Christ had not yet been preached.  Then she said, “There it is!  Let’s go!”

That is not foolhardy.  That is not a fatalistic approach to life.  That is faith in action.  God calls us to do the same.  It might not be life-threatening, but there will be suffering.

We cannot afford not to go.  The salvation of many people depends on it.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.