2004 Term 2 Week 3 - What can I do?

Be with others.
Romans 12:9-21 (15)
DEFINITION OF WITH
If I were to come and sit with you would that be being with you? Let’s find out.

Here I am with my friend Mark. He doesn’t look excited to have me with him. I’ve made a big effort to come and be with him and he doesn’t seem to be very appreciative of it. And well he shouldn’t. I have come to him on my terms. And am asking him to be with me, rather than going to be with him.

If you think back to verse 15 it says “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” If I am going to be with you I need to know where you’re at. How can I know whether to rejoice or mourn unless I take notice of your mood?

And yet it is not that simple. I want to do a compare and contrast exercise. I am not trying to contrast between right and wrong, or even good and bad, just highlight how we struggle to be “with” each other. We don’t often rejoice with those who rejoice. Sometimes we:
* Give them a quite word and bring them back down to earth
* Stop them from getting a big head
* Tell a similar story that happened to me and steal the limelight
* Think what about me, why doesn’t that happen to me?

And even when it comes to mourning with those who mourn. Sometimes we:
* Try to cheer them up
* Avoid them because we don’t know what to say or that we might say the wrong thing
* Give them time on their own to ‘get over it’

Examples of Withness
I think we do a very good job of avoiding being with people. Such a good job that we struggle to know what it means to be with people.

When my friend Darren Webb announced his engagement to Karen I found it hard to rejoice with him because it brought up all my emotions about not having a girlfriend and how alone I felt.

I was a leader on a camp a few years ago and one of the guys on the camp was real depressed and was considering suicide. I felt so out of my depth. I didn’t know what to do, my every instinct was to run away, to pass the responsibility to someone else. And for some reason I didn’t. I knelt down beside him prayed. For me that is one of the loudest moments of being with someone.

On another camp I was a leader on … adoption.

We have a God who knows how hard it is to be with people. A God who knows the cost of remaining with people. A God who became one of us and walked as a man. The Bible tells us that he partied with people. The Bible tells us that he cried with people.

Matthew 20:1-16 – Parable of the Workers in the vineyard. The workers found it hard to rejoice with those who the landowner had been generous to.
Luke 15:11-32 – Parable of the Lost Son