Just Walk Away

Jesus teaches that there are times when we should walk away. In teaching his disciples about how to interact with people, he teaches this:
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. - Matthew 10:14

This same teaching comes up 4 times in the Gospels, and once in the book of Acts you see the early church leaders shaking off the dust of their feet and walking away (Acts 13:51). That suggests that this was not some peripheral teaching, but part of the basics of how Jesus told people they should interact.

Of course this has to be balanced with Jesus’s patience with people who rejected him and how he forgave them. But that doesn’t mean that we are called to be doormats. Jesus is very clear: it’s okay to walk away.

So how do you determine what are the appropriate reasons to walk away? How do you discern the Spirit’s leading to walk away? How do you decide if it’s just a knee-jerk emotional reaction that demonstrates immaturity vs. when is it coming from a deep sense of who you are as a person that is being violated? How do we integrate this teaching with Jesus’s teaching to forgive people “seventy times seven”?

One of the difficulties here is that Jesus doesn’t lay out a clear litmus test - so much of it comes down to knowing ourselves, being open to the Spirit, and having wise friends around us to help discern these things. So would you pray for those three things right now?