This morning’s word is The Thing That Points Away from You.
The anchor verses are John 4:29 and Acts 1:8.
Two groups of people were asked to be kind for two weeks, and only one of them got better in the way they hoped.
Researchers at UCLA ran the study with more than seven hundred people, split into groups. One group was asked to do three acts of kindness each week toward themselves. Treat yourself. Be good to yourself. The other group was asked to do three acts of kindness each week toward other people. Reach out to a friend. Help someone. Give something away. Two weeks, three kind acts a week. The only difference was the direction the kindness pointed. Inward, or outward.
Both groups felt a little better, but not the same. The people who were kind to themselves felt less depressed, and that was good. But the people who were kind to others felt less depressed, less anxious, and less lonely. They got the deeper relief. And when the researchers looked at why, the answer was simple. The people who turned outward felt more connected to others. The kindness pulled them out of their own heads.
The thing that healed them most was not looking harder at themselves. It was looking away from themselves, toward someone else.
That is one of the truest things about how you are made. You were not built to find peace by staring at yourself. You were built to find it by turning outward. In a world that keeps telling you the answer is more self-focus, a study quietly shows the opposite. The people who got free were the ones who gave themselves to someone else.
There is a story in the Bible that says the same thing, only better. A woman met Jesus at a well at noon. She was an outsider with a complicated past, drawing water in the heat to avoid the crowds. Jesus spoke to her, and He knew everything about her, and He did not turn away. And something happened in her. Then she did something worth noticing. She did not stay there basking in the moment. She left her water jar and ran back to her town, the town she had been avoiding, and she said to the people, come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. She pointed away from herself, toward Him.
And watch what her pointing did. The people came out to see for themselves. And after they met Him, they told her something remarkable. We no longer believe just because of what you said. Now we have heard for ourselves. Her testimony got them to Jesus, and then she stepped out of the way, and they met Him directly. That is what a witness does. A witness is not the point. A witness points.
This is the whole shape of a life that works. Not a life that performs, not a life that proves itself, not a life spent staring inward trying to feel like enough. A life that turns outward. The old bishop Ignatius, writing on his way to die, kept saying it in his letters. It is not I, he wrote, but Christ through me. He would not make himself the center even at the end.
And that pointing is not just the right thing to do. It is the thing that frees you. When you stop trying to fix yourself by looking at yourself, and you turn toward someone else, you get out of the prison of your own head. The anxiety loosens. The loneliness lifts. You were carrying a weight that only got heavier the more you focused on it, and it finally lightens when you look up and out, at GOD and at the person next to you.
Jesus told His followers, you will be my witnesses, to the ends of the earth. Not experts. Not people with all the answers. Witnesses. People who saw something and point to it. And the oldest practice of faith has always included this same outward turn into action. Care for the orphan and the widow in their distress, one letter says. Look after the people who cannot do anything for you.
So if you woke up today tangled in yourself, anxious, exhausted from trying to feel okay, hear this. The way out is not deeper in. It is out. Point your life away from yourself. Tell someone what HE has done. Care for someone who is hurting. Give something away. You were made to be a witness, and a witness is freed by the very thing they point to.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
This Sunday’s Marc My Sabbath homily, The One Who Turns Around, carries this word further. Read it here.