Experience
July 29, 2008
Everyone one experiences darkness. It is folly to ignore that fact. Yet, I am forced by the experiences of life to wonder if in fact everyone experiences the same lack of light in their darkness. Perhaps what is more dangerous is the inability, or the lack of desire of people to admit that they have not experienced the darkness that the person across the table, over the phone, through the Internet, has experienced. As Americans, we have a great desire to shove absolutely everything into a convenient box, claim that God alone can lighten the night, and then proceed to tell you that you haven’t pushed the button on the flashlight God has given you correctly and that is why God alone can’t lighten your night.
Dallas Willard writes, “The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” We live in a Christian society that preaches that it wants to help us, but don’t become a burden to us. If you can’t accept the advice we give you, unreflective and simplistic as it often is, then the problem is not we, its you for not having the faith to get the job done. Combine this with those whose darkness exceeds the typical pale eerie fear of being a burden on others, even those who God sends into their lives to help with healing.
Yes, God sends people into others lives to be His instruments of healing. Yes, as the Church we are an indispensable part of God’s plan of healing and salvation. There is a quiet heresy that many many people in the Church hold today. Perhaps it is more insidious even than Prosperity Doctrine, more dangerous because of its paralyzing effect. I shall express it in the terms expressed to me. Upon coming into a certain group of people’s lives I was exhorted by them to “trust people, because in order to trust God, you have to trust people (by people they meant people in the Church, Christians)”. However, later upon a very sudden and wrenching rejection of love, many of the very same people expressed with genuine shock, “of course she hurt you, you can’t trust people, you can only trust God!” Aside from being a great example of how Christians walk up to their wounded and with kind soothing words put a bullet in their brain, it demonstrates a disturbing tendency away from responsibility among Christians.
Hypocrisy aside, the problem demonstrated is that Christian’s have found the perfect method for doing absolutely nothing while sounding very holy. We speak words of invitation to come and be supported. We tell the world, “Come! Let us shoulder your burdens! Let us soothe your wounds!” Yet, when they enter in, quickly they find that there are only so many burdens and wounds we are willing to shoulder and soothe free of charge. The charge? Only too often is that our egos and understandings are pet at the same time by the one we are helping.
Give God the shout out, the one really important here is us.
Christians don’t walk with people when their own lives and spirituality are in danger. As soon as we see our good feelings (which we use the phrase, “spiritual lives”) being infringed upon, we set a line in the dirt…we construct a box, and if the person we are trying to “help” can’t put their issues in that box, we blame them and walk away. We set ourselves up as god with pat answers and methods to healing. In our desire to help, we have become blasphemers. We don’t trust God enough to put our well-being on the line. God blesses us with streams of living water that flow from within us[1] and we turn around and dam those waters up because we lack the faith to believe that the source is eternal. Like a tank on a Texas ranch around mid-August, that water ceases to be life giving and becomes putrid, slowly drying up leaving cracked ground in its place.
Maybe the truth is that we don’t trust God enough to be helpless. How uncomfortable we become when our words and actions don’t elicit the response of healing and gratitude we seek. We may genuinely seek gratitude from our hurting sister to go to God and not us, but when it doesn’t appear in the form we look for, how despondent we quickly become. Is it that our faith is only as strong as the amazing and undeniable miracle we need God to do in the one who hurt’s life? There is a truth to be known, one not readily accepted…perhaps one not seen because we’ve blinded ourselves to true miracles in the way we will only accept the “big” ones. The truth is that when you are looking at your mother, best friend, girlfriend, pastor, or complete stranger and the tears will not stop flowing from their eyes and the words of despair will not be stopped up you are doing more good than your ego will let you know. Maybe the greatest miracle that can happen is that you will stop praying for a sudden miracle, a quick change of heart or emotion in that dear person, and will start praying for your own patience.
Most of the time we pray for patience we pray for it only in light of bearing with difficult people and situations. Most of us need patience to complete the work God is doing in and through us, with “fear and trembling.”[2] Yes, its not good to loose your patience with a annoying situation, but may it be suggested that it is far worse to loose it when you are walking with someone who is in darkness? Patience is not just avoiding aggravation, it is also dieing to yourself and your own wishes. The romance of love is so often portrayed as the beautiful part of love (among Christians, this can not be shoved off on the secular world), but the most beautiful part of love is how two people bear with each other and lives full life with them. Just as the joy of the gospel heard in a sermon is completed by the remembrance and partaking of a death in communion, so is the romance is sealed in walking in each other’s darkness. People who are truly deeply in love do not desert one another when they feel helpless to help the other. They partake.
Jesus, for whatever mystery, had no choice but to suffer on the cross. Do you really think that Peter, James and John had the answers for Christ that night in the garden? Are we so arrogant to think that we would have? In such darkness that blood droplets flowed from his agony and fell quietly into the dirt from which we all came knelt the Son of Man, Son of God, our Hope’s Revealed and Completed, all alone because his friends were asleep. They were heavy of heart and didn’t know what to do or say. So they left him alone.
Jesus has borne the darkness of the hurt and abandoned. Jesus over came it. He over came it for us all. Why, then, do we fail to grasp the wondrousness of it? Why instead of silently giving strength do we fall asleep when our objections to the words we are hearing, and our declarations of complete and total devotion fail to change things? We were not called to that. To do such is to throw our pearls before swine and mock the sacrifice Christ made for us, it is to abuse grace. Christians have gotten so far from what we were meant to be. We make corbin for our beloved, and leave them to die alone in their darkness.
Truly it is time for us to lay ourselves down before our neighbors, once again. The world should not marvel at our smiles because of what we have in our lives, rather they should marvel at our smiles in spite of what we have. Moreover, our smiles should not be the shallow masks of the content, but evidence of workmanship wrought in the heat of the fire and the pounding of the hammer. They should be the evidence of things not seen. Seals of faith.
