Don’t be a Martin Luther

Any counsellor will be able to point to those clients, FUBAR’s to a person, who are impervious to change. No amount of genius on the part of the counsellor, no amount of compassion and caring, no clever turn of a phrase or the “implanting of insight” is enough to bring about healing and resolution. It can be tempting at this point to turn on the client, to reject h/her, to blame and walk away from the relationship.

This of course only happens when the counsellor has lost the big picture; when s/he has lost perspective on h/her own place in the scheme of things.

The same thing happened to Martin Luther.

Shortly after setting a course correction (leaving the Roman Catholic Church) Martin Luther turned his energy on bringing the gospel to the Jews. Certain that the freedom to be had in Christ would be grabbed at by anyone who hears the message, Luther was eager to point the way to salvation. When they rejected what had become HIS message, rather than the message owned and dispensed by Jesus at His discretion, Luther turned on the Jews in such a way that even Hitler was able to use Luther’s writings as a pattern for the Jew’s destruction.

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully the thing I want to life for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of a person he is.”
Thomas Merton

“What am I living for?” “What keeps my from being fully alive as I seek that goal?”

These are big picture questions. Like all of us from time to time, Martin Luther lost sight of the big picture. Rather than being a player in the big picture story, Martin began to see himself AS the story.

Don’t be a Martin Luther.