Hard Things
Hard Things
November 26, 2018
“So it isn’t the masses who are to blame for demanding rubbish, but rather those who aren’t capable of providing them with anything else.”
The sheriff's deputy, my companion this mission, knew too well the pain we were about to bring. My concern was as much for her as for the occupant inside the modest home. We met at the property and I wondered at the reactions a patrol vehicle might elicit - they are too often harbingers of doom. This time would be no different as we woke the young mother and broke the news to her that her oldest had taken his life the night before. As if in a tragic reversal of the birth process, her agony continued as her husband arrived - called home from work - the pain repeated as the words were repeated, then again as their remaining sons arrived early from school. Much time we spent together in the coming days and weeks as they moved from shock and loss to bewilderment and questions. Such is the process of grief.
Years earlier my companion was a godly, loving, gentle man. He was the newest member of our elder team. We had rode the elevator together and emerged onto the eighth floor of the hospital. His usual demeanor was replaced by quiet. I thought the explanation was his unfamiliarity with hospital visitation, or the burden of the task before us, or some other mundane reason. His deep baritone voice finally broke the silence. The familiar Tennessee drawl I knew so well was accented by a stress I had never heard before, "Oh no! I knew it would be like this." Our pace slowed as I prodded and he described the picture, forever cemented in his brain, of another pastor sitting in a rocking chair at the end of this very same hall and gently rocking a dying toddler - my companion's own. We prayed before entering the pediatric ward on a mission to another family trying to survive their own drama.
Leap forward in time and the companion is a teenage boy, his dark skin a stark contrast to the pale skin of the woman on the other side of the curtain. The boy and his two sisters possessed all the appearances of relation, yet none shared a common ancestor save for the couple in a garden we all share. Still...this was a family, and the woman beyond the curtain was the mother. She had sacrificed much as a single woman to individually adopt her three treasures and bring them from a faraway land to America's still wild west. For months she had battled cancer and had stubbornly refused to tell her children when the doctors shook their heads and informed her that everything humanly possible had been done. We had received a call from hospice to gather the family for the time was imminent. Seven minutes - the town was so small it took just seven minutes to cross from one side to another - in those seven minutes she passed and her children never said their goodbyes.
On this occasion, it was not one companion, but many. Our mission was to dissect and analyze a moment in another's life. The process is criminal cycle, the setting is prison and the system is termed therapeutic community. Oh, by the way, the participants and spectators include guards, a therapist, chaplain and a room full of prisoners - incarcerated for the indiscretions associated with addictions to meth and a host of other drugs. Our mission, our focus this day was a lone man, newly arrived and highly nervous of the task which lay before him. In his short time in the program, he had witnessed as others endured what he now faced. In painful detail he would lay out the actions, the thoughts, the motivations, myths, lies and resulting drama of one decision in his life. His fellow inmates would call his bluff, label him liar, expose the truth and leave him reeling with the realization of what he had done. My mission? I was there for his son, his fourteen year-old whose phone calls with his surviving parent included recriminations and blame for the father's imprisonment. Whose life was more tragic, the son or the father? My sympathy was for the son, who as a toddler had been home - alone with the body of his mother, the syringe still protruding from her arm.
“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.”
― Don Quijote de la Mancha
So, am I yet another in a long line of those offering answers to unasked questions? Do I have the solution which will cease humanity's suffering and create the perfect society? Heavens no, to both those questions. I am nothing more than an agent of another. By the way, he is my unmentioned companion on the missions detailed above. Is he, then, the answer? Well, yes...and no. Yes, if you are willing to accept the hard things he has offered, and no, if you are not. Does he have the answer to cease all suffering? Yes...and no. No, because he said following him would not cease our suffering, but elicit more. Strangely, Christians are not without suffering, but how they suffer is quite different. Consider this observation - it is not that Christians do not suffer, but that they can endure much more suffering. However, I did not address the yes as of yet. Yes, Jesus did offer an end to suffering. It is not here, nor is it at this time. I like the way it is presented in the last book of the Bible....
“I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”” (Revelation 21:3–4, NLT)
So, I mentioned doing hard things. What are the hard things? I urge caution here. Some have misunderstood grace and made the message too easy. Yes, the nature of grace is unmerited, but that does not mean that the ensuing response to grace is equally as free. Others have misunderstood in the opposite extreme and made grace a hard thing. Rules and regulations follow this teaching so that it becomes a system for salvation, rather than the result of salvation. The hard things we do because of Jesus are between these two extremes of grace. Doing the hard things is what has propelled everyday humans to live extraordinary lives. When others run away from a situation, the Jesus follower runs in. When the rest of humanity cries impossible, the Jesus follower is quietly doing hard things. For this reason, Jesus followers established universities when others were content with ignorance of the masses. The doing of hard things was the impetus for exploring the mysteries of God's universe whilst others were busy maintaining control over others. Yet more caution here - there is a distinction between Jesus followers and the wolves in sheep's clothing claiming a knowledge of Christ. One looks alien, and the other too much of this world. Jesus followers do hard things by building hospitals, manning sick wards, bandaging wounds and radically loving their neighbor. Jesus followers open their homes to their neighbor, though their neighbor be a threat - this is another hard thing followers of Jesus actively do.
Finally, how is Jesus even close to being an answer to a family devastated by suicide, to a father reminded of a daughter's loss, to orphans stunned by the grotesque death of their mother, or to an addict and his suffering son? By what he claimed, and in what he did. He claimed that he and God were one and the same - yet different, one father, one son. He claimed love different from that man had seen - without reservation, or limit. He claimed a gospel of grace, mercy and hope. He claimed he would suffer death that we might live. He claimed God desires a different path for humanity. Then, he did what only God can do. What he did, what he did was what made it all real. He loved, he healed, he freed, he forgave, he died and he rose again. But it was his tears - his weeping, his sobbing, his sorrow, which tells so much. He cried, not for himself - but for humanity. The nature of his sorrow was that of Creator God, Savior God and loving God. He wept for humanity's senseless condition. He wept for our wanton destructiveness and hatred. He wept that we live and die as rebellious children intent on self destruction. I believe he weeps today. He wept as a family grieved their son took his life. He wept as the son lived with a broken heart and made a fateful decision. He wept as the deputy's fiance took his life. He wept that she lived through the grief again in serving others. He wept as a father and mother lost their daughter. he wept again that the father should revisit that pain. He wept as a mother lay dying from lung cancer. He wept as young children were orphaned - not once, but twice. He wept as a father abused his son. He wept as the father self-medicated an artificial solution to a real pain. He wept as a son was left alone. He wept at a mother's tragic death.
He weeps still. He weeps because none of this is as intended. He weeps because we fight monsters disguised as windmills. He weeps because we are mad - crazy - insane. He weeps because we believe humanity can fix this. He weeps because following him is a hard thing now that we have become so accustomed to this present madness.
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses
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