Last updated on January 20, 2023

I think at this point it’s fair to say that we are in a season of reentry into the world post pandemic. If you’re like me, that reentry comes with trepidation, even fear. The division that has risen to the surface since 2019 is still palpable. Building new relationships is scarier than ever. It can feel like we don’t know who to trust. And for good reason.

If “the great resignation,” as they are calling it, is any indication, we as a people have asked some serious questions and come up with some serious answers when it comes to living the way we believe we should live.

Though we may have managed to establish our own happy little utopias in our homes during various degrees of lockdown or quarantine, the time is here when we must engage with the rest of the world again, bringing with us the wisdom we’ve gained.

So how do we do this? How do we move forward and re-engage after a time of such introspection? After a time of such heated conflict? When elements of that conflict still exist and will continue to exist for some time? When relationships seem so much more fragile now than they used to be. When depth of relationship feels impossible?

Let’s go take a look at what Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew chapter 10 as he is sending them out into the world as the founders of his church. 

Read Matthew 10:5-31

There are three things I want us to notice as we look at this.

Grounded in Truth

Jesus sent his disciples out with a specific purpose. He charged them to be wise and innocent. He acknowledges the hostility into which they will move. He does not say he will remove them from it or that it will be removed from them. He actually says that that hostility will come against them in such a way that their bodies will be destroyed. He gives them truth. Facts. He does not sugar coat nor does he try to scare. He prepares them to know what is coming and to know what their purpose is.

Standing Firm in Love

He encourages them to stand firm by reminding them who watches out for them in love as they go about their purpose in a hostile culture. He reminds them who it is who has greater power than those with the power to destroy the body. He reminds them that they belong to that one.

Reaching Out in Hope

He tells them how to reach out in their purpose to those around them. He tells them to begin with greeting, which includes generosity, kindness, hope, openness, and peace. And he tells them how to know when it is time to stop investing in a lost cause and to go a different way. He tells them how they are to exist in wise community with others. 

So how does all of this translate to us?

Give freely, trusting God will provide

In the way we treat others, regardless of how they come, we are to freely give as we have freely received love from the father. We are not to prioritize monetary value or success, that is not our purpose. We are not to wait until we are prepared to go or to plan for all of the additional things that may occur. Our journey does not actually belong to us. We are characters in God’s great story. We are to trust that God will provide for us as we go, through the hands of those we serve, and through his own miraculous ways that we often don’t know the full story behind.

Know when to go a different way

We are to seek out those people who wish to receive the truth and goodness we bring to them. Receive it in wholeness and honesty and humility. We are to extend our favor in the direction of those people. But we are to begin with all people in the same generosity and compassion and strength of effort until they reveal themselves as those unwilling to receive.

If we have spent time with people and discovered that they are not willing to genuinely hear and receive, but that they are bent on battling, fighting, causing conflict and division for the sake of conflict and division or for the sake of their own opinions or pocketbook, we are to count them as unworthy of our investment.

We are to walk away and invest elsewhere.

Sure, God may choose to send someone else along to invest more into them and they may be ready to receive the truth we were trying to share at that time. But that is their story for God to write, and it is time for our story to move on. 

However, it is important that we, as we are able, leave those relationships with the sweet taste of the Gospel in our wake, so that the reputation of God’s family and God’s ways will not be tarnished on account of how we have behaved toward them. Perhaps God will come to them another way and they will then receive.

Remain wise, gentle, and surrendered

Just as the disciples were sent out as sheep among ravenous wolves, we are sent out into a world riddled with hostility, systemic evil, narcissism, and hard-heartedness. We are to exist among this people with strategy and intelligence, not living as fools but remaining innocent, good, pure hearted, and gentle.

Though in our gentleness we may be handed over to the leaders, the influencers, the cancel culture, we must not worry about how to respond when the time comes.  For when words are truly needed, the Holy Spirit will provide them if we remain surrendered and submitted to his leading, even under duress.

Proceed toward the promise

Increased divisions are happening and will continue to happen. Families will continue to split over issues of belief and disbelief, trust and suspicion, integrity and falsehood. We will be hated. We will be hated as Jesus was hated.

Yet, we are not to be afraid of those that hate us, harm us, ridicule us, refuse us, since “there is nothing covered that won’t be uncovered and nothing hidden that won’t be made known.” The harm done in secret will be brought to light and justice will be served.

As we remain at the feet of our Savior, working to know and understand, by the power of the Holy Spirit, what he has revealed of himself in his scriptures, we must continue to proclaim from the rooftops, the social media platforms, our neighborhoods and workplaces, and wherever we go to encounter people, what abundant live we have already lived in this way of faith-family.

Remember you are fully guarded

The worst that can happen to us is that our body will be destroyed, our minds tormented. And yes, that can be so very scary. It is, indeed, a difficult walk, one foot in front of the other, down the narrow way laid before us.

As we step, we must also remember we are known so intimately by the Father that the hairs on our head have all been counted, and he knows when they fall to the ground. That even the tiny little sparrow, valued very little in the grand scheme of things, does not die without our God’s consent.

And we are worth more to him than many sparrows. 

Nothing will come to us and be allowed to torment or destroy us without his permission. He looks out for us. What he allows, he equips us for. He goes before us, he walks with us, and he comes after us. We are never alone in our abundance or our suffering.

Re-entry in 3…2…1

So as we move forward in what can be a fearful time, let us focus on the purpose we have been given, the wisdom of God in which we are called to walk, and the way we are to connect with others as we walk in the shelter of his wings.