Divine Plagiarism

I remember reading Tom Clancy books while growing up. I would get about a quarter of the way into the book, and then I would turn to the last page. I mean, it doesn’t make much sense to read the last page before you know enough about the book for it to mean anything. You have to know some basic things about the plot and the characters first. But by the time you’re a good ways into the book, and you know the setting and the characters, you want to see which ones make it to the end. You want to see who wins. A temptation, like an itch at the back of your head. It may have been a measure of control. Knowing the ending, you could stand above the plot and wait for it to get there. You could be in the story and above it at the same time. Inevitably, I gave in to the temptation.

Strangely, I didn’t read the ending of Narnia or Lord of the Rings until I was supposed to. There was something different about these books. It was almost like it would spoil it. It wasn’t the plot. It was you. These books changed you. If you read the end, you interfered with the magic. I wanted to be in the middle of the story the whole way. I wanted to read the ending only when the author intended me to do so. Only when the story had changed me into someone who could truly appreciate the ending. It wasn’t that the ending wasn’t already good. It’s just that I wasn’t ready to hear it. I was only ready when it arrived; only ready exactly when I needed to be and no sooner.

I think it is the same with this story. Side story. Given the demands of my career and the vicissitudes of world events, I wrote a friend of a friend with a request. If I were not to return, then I wanted her (C.) to have my accounting of this story. This is an unpleasant topic, and I will skip right to the relevant details. As a part of my request, I realized that if the story was over, if C. had gotten married or something of the like, then the friend of a friend might tell me that in the course of explaining why they would or would not be able to carry out my request. I realized I did not want to know. Not because I was scared of it. I just wanted to read the rest of the book. If that was the last page, I wanted to read it precisely when my Author intended and not a moment before. (My solution was to ask for simply a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ I told them I trusted their reasons for either to be honorable, and hence not requiring an explanation.)

I realized this about myself: I don’t really like doing something just to prove a point. When I read a bad ending, I’m liable to quit reading the book. I think I may not be alone in this. It is an act of mercy, sometimes, that we can’t turn to the last page of our stories. I think we would see far fewer of our stories through to the end. We would skip all the stories that don’t end the way we want them to. And how much we would miss. Lewis never falls in love with Joy. My good friend Brandon, barred from aviation by a flight surgeon, never dreams to be a pilot. And three years ago, I spend another five minutes on the third floor of Littauer checking my email, instead of walking downstairs and out into the Kennedy School’s courtyard. I never see my friend N. sitting in that courtyard talking with a girl; I never join them at the red picnic table, and I never meet that pretty girl with curly hair. With my seat at that table blissfully unoccupied, she finishes her conversation, and walks away. I never take her flying to Martha’s Vineyard, I never have to remember the way she curls her hair between her fingers, or how her laugh echoes off the buildings of Putnam Street. I never have to get my hopes up, and I never get my heart broken. This story never gets written.

Who I was then would not have been willing to live this story. Who I am now is. To whatever end. In the undoing of the story, I would get a lot of time, money and tears back. I think, though, I would lose something greater in its unweaving. Sometimes, when we read the rest of the pages, we become someone who can read the ending. Sometimes, when God tells us to wait on Him for the answer to a prayer, He is waiting for us to become the person who can receive that answer. So Aragorn must walk the Paths of the Dead to become the man who can face Sauron at the Gates of Mordor. The ranger would not have dared. But the ranger passes away, and the king is born. The king dares. He only understands where his path leads once he becomes the man who can walk it.

This is true for all of us. We are training for utopia. We have set out upon a path which leads to the presence of God. Along that path, He makes us into the people who can walk it. With each step, we learn how to take the next step. If He were to tell us about all the valleys, about all the boulders, about all the stories that end in tears, few of us would have the strength to keep walking. Even though we know when we come to Christ that it will cost us our life, some of us might have left well enough alone if we had seen the exact accounting of how that cost would be paid. Praise God that He is gentle in our sanctification, only growing us by the exact amount we can handle at that point in time. It is amazing, I am finding, that when you choose to walk by faith, God remakes you into someone who can walk the path of faith. By grace, and by works, all at once. By grace we can do His works, yet in doing His works, we find the grace to persevere in our labors.

Even so, God knows how badly we want to turn to the last page. In the knowledge of a good ending, we keep turning pages, even as they get harder to turn. So He gives us the last page most worth reading. He’s coming back. We win. That’s all He tells us, and it’s all we need to know. We spend a lot of time talking about prophecy. We live in prophetic times, no doubt. Remember, though, how wrong the Old Testament scholars were. Only in looking back is Matthew able to make sense of all the prophecies. Only when he had actually turned through the pages did the ending make sense. The same is true for us. We will understand the ending when we turn to it in the order the Author intends. We should eagerly anticipate His return, but we could probably worry a little less about the specifics of that return. The Great Commission is still before us, and the fields are white with grain. We should learn to play the roles we have now, hoping that the next page we turn will bring us to the last page. Then, and only then, will we be ready to read it. Still, we pray Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus.

In some ways, forgiveness is like giving your life to Christ. You mean it when you first do it, but it is only through God’s work in your life that you end up understanding what that means. We are redeemed when we give our life to Him. We are sanctified throughout the course of our lives, as He cashes in the promise we made piece by piece. We give Him the deed to the house all at once, but He remodels the house into His dwelling over time. I meant it when I gave my life to Christ. He still shows me what that meant and leads me in going about it. Forgiveness is the same way. I meant it when I forgave her, even while reading the words she used to wound me. I am still learning what that means.

Last night, I said a prayer at peace for her. I think that was the first prayer I have said for her in a long time that has truly been at peace. Before, I prayed stubbornly, I blessed her defiantly. I knew there were parts of my heart that did not truly want to see her blessed. Parts of my heart were still wounded, parts still cried out for vengeance. I felt places where unforgiveness held on with pit bull teeth. I prayed despite these parts of my heart, I blessed her in defiance of them. I asked God to teach me to pray the prayers that I would pray if I really loved her the way He does. He taught me those prayers, and I prayed them as an act of the will. I blessed her over the roar of the currents of my heart, blessed her at the top of my lungs. Yet, last night, the currents were stilled. I prayed for her softly, quietly. I prayed simply. Not even about forgiveness. I didn’t need to choose to forgive. She was already forgiven. It was done. So I just prayed for her. I whispered a blessing for her, and it slipped across the glassy surface of the water. There were no swells to swallow it up, no waves to drown it out. It was just there. ‘May God’s love be with you.’

Forgiveness follows a path, I think. A path of healing. When we say, ‘I forgive you,’ we set out on that path. We forgive despite the storms of our heart, and we choose to keep forgiving until those storms begin to die down. The will remind us of how the other has insulted us in every possible way. We have to choose to forgive them for each of those ways, choose to bless them regardless. In time, the winds and rains peter out, and there is little more than a breeze left as the wound heals. That breeze blows away whatever of the pain as the forgiveness is worked to its completion. In the aftermath of the storm, the still waters run deep. In the totality of forgiveness, nothing remains below the surface to explode at the turning of the tides. We are restored to simplicity and wholeness.

There is a vast difference between forgiveness and excusal. To be forgiven, you must be tried and convicted, then be pardoned. The pardon is irrevocable. In excusing someone, you are only agreeing not to try them, usually in exchange for them agreeing not to try you. If they break their bargain, you can always bring them before the court. There is no statute of limitations. It is better to be pardoned. If we are to forgive someone, we must allow them to be tried and convicted, and then we must pardon them.

In this courtroom, we are not the judge. Surely, if we were, it would always be a kangaroo court, finding in our favor. We must yield to the true Judge, and bring our complaint before Him. (We must then be ready to hear Him convict any guilt on our parts, let that guilt be tried, and seek pardons ourselves.) So the trial begins with the summons. In the same way, the path of healing begins with the legitimization of wound’s pain. ‘You hurt me’ is the critical phrase here. If the other will not hear it, then bring it to God. One may be tried in absentia. Of course, a pardon given in absentia cannot be received until the one tried shows up to the court. Then the conviction. The one on trial may plead guilty, hopefully after consulting with the Judge. They may not, in which case you must turn to the Judge for his decision. If the tried is found guilty, you must wait for the Him to inform the tried of their guilt. You are not the one to do it. Along the path of healing, hopefully the other will apologize when you approach them. If not, then you must simply raise the case on your prayers. You are not trying the other person. Let the Judge deal with them. Once He pronounces the verdict, then comes the pardon. Pardons are irrevocable. There is no double jeopardy. But we are forever tied to the trial until we pronounce the pardon. We must remember how much we have been forgiven, and draw from that account in our forgiveness. We forgive. We may have to forgive in absentia, if the other is not willing to show up for court. But we must forgive nonetheless. The pardon will be waiting for them when they are willing to come pick it up. We are released from the trial. Perhaps there is one more phase of the trial. The prayers for reconciliation. And this is where I am now.

In the course of the last week, I think I finally recognized my pain. Instead of asking the world to legitimate my pain, I finally asked God. No longer trying to disprove ’you hurt you,’ or ‘nobody hurt you,‘ I finally let the truth of ’you hurt me’ sink in to the core of the wound. I had been afraid to ask God to adjudicate… I had blamed Him for some of the pain. I finally renounced that. In His verdict, ’I don’t like how she treated you,’ the trial was over. Not that I was right. Not that she was a bad person. Just that she hurt me. The pain was legitimate, the wound legitimate, and the pardon legitimate. And irrevocable. I forgive her, totally and finally. Perhaps, one day, she will come by to pick up the pardon. Perhaps, one day, we will be reconciled. And perhaps she has a trial for me out there. I await the summons. I plan on pleading guilty.

Situation for today. You are Adam. You’re in Eden. Your wife, Eve, comes up to you holding the forbidden fruit, which is conspicuously minus a mouthful-worth. (We are, of course, assuming that he wasn’t right there when she was eating the fruit. I don’t have the telemetry feed. Sorry.) You have the aircraft, or the fate of humanity, as the case may be. Unfortunately, as we all know, our great-great-great-and a bunch of other greats-grandfather did not choose wisely. No ‘take a seat’ for him. The ‘sit down’ was disastrous, and certainly involved the booming voice of God. So, really, this is more a safety board than a stand-up. For all non-zipper-suited-sun-demi-deities out there, sorry about the inside joke.

What sorts of thoughts are running through Adam’s head? How can he wrap him head around the situation? His wife, the woman who shares his very essence, has just introduced sin into their union. He is united to her in relationship, yet she has cut herself off from relationship with God. She is undeniably wrong, but yet he is responsible.

She was wrong. Love knows when to say no, and when to confront. To ignore that she was wrong, Adam does a disservice to himself, her and God. He is like the cowardly man, who gets browbeat whenever he has an argument with his wife, and says, ‘I’m so sorry honey, you were totally right.’ This man is not loving his wife if she was in fact wrong. If she was wrong, then he forgets his loyalties: first to God, then to her. (Of course, if she was right, he should take ownership and apologize.) If he does not love God more, then he will love her less. Adam chose Eve over God, and did her a tremendous disservice in doing so. He needs to own the situation, not be owned by it.

In owning the situation, he realizes that he was responsible. Just as the lover feels the pain of their beloved, the lover feels the guilt of the beloved through the link of their love. He is not the offender, but he must become the intercessor. He must bear the guilt of both of them before God. Remember something about ’as Christ loves the church?’ He must not deny the sin of his beloved, but neither will he abandon her to her fate. It is his responsibility to take ownership of the situation, his responsibility to confront the wrong, and his responsibility to reconcile their relationship to each other and to God. Love speaks kindly and compassionately, confronts the wrong, and then keeps no record of it. Love remembers that anything that happens in a relationship involves both people. And can only be solved with both people. So love accepts what portion of the blame was theirs, realizing that if Adam was doing his job, Eve probably wouldn’t have taken the fruit.

Imagine if Adam had recognized the wrong of his wife and chosen to take responsibility for her? God wrote a plan of salvation for the fallen couple. Does it not stand to reason that He would have made a plan to save Eve if she alone had fallen… Can you imagine an Eden where Adam refused to eat the fruit? Where he came before God with his wife, where he interceded for her in repentance for both of them? Where he acknowledged his role in her choice to take the fruit and prostrated himself before the throne of Grace? Instead of ‘its her fault for bringing it to me, its Your fault for giving her to me,’ imagine ‘I take the blame of my wife upon myself…please have mercy upon a sinner.’ I think history may have played out quite differently. Adam failed. He failed in his wrong choice to eat of the tree, and he failed just as deeply in his choice to shirk responsibility. He trusted in fig leaves to cover the shame of his family instead of trusting in the depth of God’s love. Praise God that the Second Adam succeeded where the first one failed.

Adam was in a covenant relationship. I was not. Yet the same dynamics apply, if to a lesser degree. I was so busy trying to blame everything on her that I never took responsibility for the story. I acted far more like the first Adam than the Second. In my story, I first tried to excuse her wrong by participating in it. When that failed, I blamed her wrong choices for my own wrong choices. It took me far too long to realize that her being wrong did not make me right. It just made us both wrong. I failed to take responsibility until the very end. My failure to confront the dynamics, worse, my participation in them made me just as guilty as her. I wanted to hold on to the relationship by excusing the wrong things that were happening. I thought that if I were to take responsibility and confront them, then we would never talk again. Just like Adam thought. So instead I followed her into sin, just as he did. In doing so, I failed God, her, and myself. Finally, when I did confront her, I was wrong even as I was right. My words were not kind. They were not intentionally cruel, but they were not kind. They may have been words that needed to be said, but they could have been said better. They may have been factually correct, but they were not loving. So I am the first Adam. Praise God that the Second Adam is so much better than me.

‘That Jesus guy may be okay, I just don’t like his friends.’ - Anonymous

We imperfectly represent Christ. Of course we do, we are jars of clay. The world sees this, and they accuse us. They don’t like us, so they reject Him. Before we get too deep into self-flagellation, we should remind ourselves that when Jesus showed up, people didn’t like Him much either. He died in the hands of the people who hailed Him as Messiah days earlier. And the same may be true with this accusation. When somebody says, I like Jesus, I just don’t like His followers, you must ask what that person’s conception of Jesus is. Sometimes, that person has re-invented Christ into a ‘nice guy’ who is a ‘good moral teacher.’ So he likes who he thinks Jesus should be, which is usually a reflection of himself. Which puts him squarely in both the Palm Sunday crowd and the Good Friday crowd. (Of course, we are in the same crowd.) Still, I think there may be a kernel of truth in the accusation.

People get mad at God for the way Christians act. The getting mad part is not necessarily the problem, surely Christ said some things that raised the ire of the people around Him. It is one thing, though, to be hated for representing Christ. It is quite another thing to be hated for doing sinful things and hurting others. As sinners saved by grace, we do both; the latter, of course, being the problem. Christ gets blamed for our sin in the eyes of the world. Christ took the blame for our sin at Golgotha before God, let us rejoice in that. Nonetheless, the sin of those who bear His name still discredits Him before those who need Him the most. The simple fact is that people blame God for our sins as Christians. It isn’t just the world that blames God for the sins of His people. Christians do it too.

Here is my story. I was wounded deeply by a Christian. Walked upon. Not to play the martyr, I was a party to my own wounding, and I’m pretty sure I hurt her in return. I take responsibility for that role. But the pain is real, nonetheless. This part of the story began about two years ago. This girl led a college ministry. This girl talked a lot about Him. This girl was even named after Him. And all the words she said, even when she was hurting me, were in fluent Christian-ese. As the resentment built (I had not yet learned this was a symptom of a boundary conflict,) I had a hard time differentiating her from Him. I started to believe that if she was this way, He must be this way. I began to blame Him for her failures. And as I learned that I could not trust her, Christ became guilty by association.

This ‘guilt by association’ seems especially true for pastor’s kids. I don’t think it is just the stresses of being the poster child for the congregation, it is more than that. The father is the first real representation the child has of God. It is certainly not unheard of to take out resentment at a father figure on God (I.e. Jean-Paul Sartre.) When the father is not only the representative of God to the family, but also the congregation and the world, the father-God link is written in stone. When the child initially asserts his independence in rebellion, he may cut his links with God along with his links with his father, even with the best of dads (I.e. Franklin Graham.) When the child sees failings in their father, then the guilt by association will be all the more intense. If they do not believe they can trust their father, then they will distrust God even more so. So, hypothetically, one child runs into agnosticism and rebellion. And the other runs into the ministry, but never really faces the fact that the same rage lives in her heart. She buries it under layer after layer of good works, but it is still there. It still poisons her ability to trust anyone, especially a man. This is because she first does not trust Him, especially in that part of her life. But she can’t really admit it to herself, so she walls it off and covers it with whitewash. It remains safely hidden, poisoning the aquifer of her heart. Hypothetically, of course.

In the movies, the bad guy generally blames the consequences of his evil actions on the good guy. The conniving but responsible-looking villain cons the kindly but naïve protagonist into his plot. When the plot is found out, the villain blames the hero, whose name is all over the incriminating documents, unbeknownst to him. Think the movie ‘Dave.’ Our enemy does likewise. He incites us to blame God for the ways we have been hurt. Not just from Christians, but also for the way that fate has been unkind to us. He is to blame for every time a loved one dies, for every hope that is shattered. We put God in the dock, to steal CSL’s phrase, and we try Him for every time we have been hurt. But that court is a kangaroo court; the verdict is always the same. Of course God is to blame. He could have changed it if he wanted. Unfortunately, we do not have any powers of extradition, so we cannot enforce our verdict. The only penalty we can impose is exile from our souls. A penalty the enemy hopes we will invoke, for in doing so, we cut ourselves off from our only means of reconciliation and healing.

The enemy’s attack is double-edged. In making God a party to our wound, he de-legitimizes our pain. Where else can we seek vindication when the highest court has already ruled in favor of those who hurt us? We fear in approaching Him that He will further de-legitimize the pain. We think that He has another finger pointing at us. This could not be less true. His heart is not for accusation, but for reconciliation. He feels the pain of sin more severely than we can imagine. Pierced hands stretched across a board speak to that. His arms are still stretched open for us.

Sometimes the only vindication of an wound we can get is from God. Sometimes, the one who wounded us will refuse to recognize they played any part in the wounding. The only way that our pain can be legitimized is in Him. He was pierced for our iniquities. He understands what it is like to get hurt by somebody else’s sin. He is the only source of healing. Seek Him. Ask Him.

God answered me. Really, He had been ready to answer me for a while. I just wasn’t ready to listen. I realized how long I had distrusted Him, how long I had blamed Him for her actions. In asking Him to vindicate me, I was really asking Him to vindicate Himself. I wanted Him to prove that He wasn’t her by taking my side. I wanted to hear ‘you were right and she was wrong.’ At the same time, part of me believed He really was on her side, against me. I believed He would confirm that my pain was illegitimate. I didn’t want to listen, because I was afraid I would hear ‘she was right all along.’ I was wrong on both counts. In a still, small voice, I heard something I did not expect. I heard Him say, ‘I don’t like how she treated you.’

You must have a wound if you are to be healed of it. If you want somebody to stay wounded, convince them that they have no wound. Pain tells us that we are wounded. De-legitimize their pain, and they won’t be able to get the wound healed. In the bad old days, people used to poison the tip of their sword with an anti-coagulant. The sword would cut its victim, but the wound could not form a scab. It would just keep bleeding. We do the same when we de-legitimize the pain of someone we hurt. They can only stop the bleeding by burying the wound under layers and layers of bandages, or by fixing a tourniquet on that part of our heart, cutting it off to stop the hemorrhage. Either way, the wound never really heals.

This poison comes in different forms. Some are direct: ‘I never did that,’ ‘if you feel that way, it‘s your own fault,’ or ‘why don’t you quit being a big baby and just get over it.’ Some use nicer words, but just as cruel. ‘you’re a nice person, but I’m not a part of your issues with me.’ Emphasis on ‘your issues,’ the ‘me’ being an innocent bystander. ‘You made this train wreck happen. I just happened to be there. So its still, really, all your fault.’ With even more subtlety, ‘I am sorry you feel that way, I am not sure what role I had in it.’ Here, the English language offers us a very convenient sleight-of-hand. We use the same word ‘sorry’ to describe both ’apologetic’ and ’sympathetic.’ We are sympathetic to the victims of a train wreck. We should be apologetic if we had a part in its coming off the tracks. It is the same thing again: ‘I was not a party to your pain. You are wrong to tell me that ‘I hurt you.’ Really, ‘you hurt you.’ So quit trying to drag me into it.’ De-legitimization robs us of that critical first step toward healing, that recognition that ’you hurt me.’ Only after that realization can we forgive, and only after we forgive can we be healed.

We must learn to see the pain through the eyes of the other. We are usually blind to the ways we hurt others, and it is often only though their eyes or their words that we can understand the impact of our actions. I know that my first inclination when confronted is to sympathize and then explain how I am not at fault. Only by being on the other side of this response have I learned how cowardly it is. If I had just been a jerk to them, at least they would have known to dismiss my accusation and seek vindication from Someone better than I. May God forgive me and heal those I have hurt. Anything that happens in the context of relationship involves both parties to that relationship. This is about taking ownership and taking responsibility, not just for our actions, but also for their impact on others. Our choices create collateral damage. We must take responsibility not only for the intention of the act, but also for its consequences. Probably, if the other is coming to us for an apology, then they have laid down their hatred for us, and are setting out on the path of forgiveness and healing. We should not hinder them with our pride. A note of caution. There are those who use their pain as a weapon, a means of manipulation. Just as the beggars in Jerusalem, there are those who pick the scabs of their heart as a means of getting attention or power. So we should be as innocent as doves in handing out apologies, but as cunning as wolves before acceding to any demands for restitution. Guilt trips have cost many an honest person their honor. Apologies are free. If the other is in earnest, they will then move beyond the apology into forgiveness, the wound will be healed, and the and the thing will be laid to rest.

A good friend of mine told me a story the other day. It seems that a guy who had hurt her five or six years ago ended up calling her up to apologize for ways he had hurt her long in the past. She said that the pain of the wound had long past by that point, she and him were even friends again. Yet, she felt vindicated by the things he said. She forgave him, and the thing was not spoken of again, but the apology was still crucial. I remember her saying ‘it proved to me that I wasn’t crazy to feel hurt by what he did.’ In apologizing, he legitimated her pain. He told her that she was right to say ‘you hurt me.’ And in her forgiveness, they were reconciled. Praise God.

We still believe that ‘time heals all wounds.’ It doesn’t. Time may provide more objectivity, a better perspective on things than when in the passions of the moment, but time cannot heal. We think that it heals because we think that forgetting is the same as healing, and time helps us to forget. I can walk with a limp so long that I forget that the limp is even there, but that is quite different from being healed of the limp. So we buy into this ‘Eternal Sunshine’ idea of healing, that when we get enough distance we can just leave it behind. But we never really do. Like in ‘Hitch,’ where the guy and girl are finally honest and vulnerable with each other, they don’t talk about people who hurt them last year. For both of them, it is some little thing from their youth that haunts them. Forgetfulness does not heal us. Jesus does. Only He can reconcile broken hearts to broken hearts.

I should probably face some pretty hard truths about this situation. We all can appreciate the story of Beren and Luthien. Beren falls so in love with Luthien that in order to win her hand, he pledges himself to the impossible task of recovering a Silmaril. Here’s the thing, though. She loves him, and she wants him to win. It is one thing to fight a dragon to win the heart of a princess. It is a quite different thing when the dragon is the princess’ pet; where in the battle between you and the dragon, she’s rooting for the dragon. I don’t like getting kicked in the teeth, yet that is all I can realistically expect from the woman that I knew. Past actions, after all, are the best predictor of future actions. There must be some difference between this story and simple masochism; otherwise, I am the greatest of fools.

Most of our stories are variations on a theme, it is very rare that something totally new happens. The other day, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine. Long story short, she was interested in what seemed to be a pretty cool guy. The problem was that this guy wouldn’t make up his mind. He would take a step forward, then back out, over and over again. He liked her attention, but he wasn’t willing to take any risks to find her or to let himself be found. She ended up taking all the risks, and she ended up getting hurt when he would back out. He would say a lot of nice things in Christian-ese about how much he cared about her or whatever, but his words didn’t really seem to have much bearing on his actions. It made me angry. She is a really cool girl, and I greatly disliked that this guy was hurting my friend with his selfish and cowardly behavior.

If I were to meet the guy, I would probably think he was a interesting, decent sort of fellow. Brother in Christ, intelligent, gentle, all that. But it was not the guy’s a priori characteristics I resented, rather his actions concerning my friend. A relationship isn’t just about who you are or who the other person is; it is just as much about how they treat you and how you treat them. The sound from a guitar string is as much a function of the string itself as it is a function of the string’s points of attachment. The same is true of a relationship. How the other person treats you is just as important as who they are. Herein lies our quandary.

When a bad person does bad things, it is not tremendously surprising. The abusive man will probably treat his girlfriend poorly. Neither is it surprising when a good person (insofar as we understand goodness on this side of the fall) does good things. The man who acts honorably will likely treat his girlfriend with honor. What seems to give us a lot of heartburn in Christian communities is when good people do bad things. When the pastor chooses expediency over holiness. When the father chooses career over children. When the girl that you know loves Jesus hurts you willfully, intentionally and repeatedly.

Looking at things objectively, she’s (C ) a pretty cool girl. I know she loves Jesus. I’m pretty sure she would die for Him. I would almost say she ‘loves Him with her whole heart,’ but I no longer believe that to be the case. You can’t love Him with your whole heart when you are unwilling to face parts of that heart. I should know. Regardless, she’s a pretty, smart and funny girl. She’s crazy, but I like how she’s crazy. I believe she dreams crazy dreams, some of the same ones I dream. She is strong, and would be more so if she would choose to face her fears and find her strength. There are a lot of cool things about her. Most of my friends, I believe, would generally like her were they to meet her. But this was never the issue. The reason they disliked her so greatly had little to do with who she was. Just as I disliked how this guy was treating my friend, they disliked how she treated me.

Pardon my lack of eloquence, but the way she treated me was bull****. I think hearing the story of my friend brought this realization back to the surface for me. She treated me the same way that guy is treating my friend. I don’t feel a need to explain myself here. I have already tried her in the courts of my friends. I regret doing so, have repented of having done so, and it is not my intention to do so again here. So believe me or disbelieve me as you see fit. One of my friends once said ‘I don’t see her behaving in any way that is worthy of you.’ This will sound vindictive, but it is not. He told me this during one of the highs the interaction between her and I. I strongly disagreed with him. His statement makes me twice the fool for not having listened to my friends. It is a skill I have only learned recently, over the last year or so. Nonetheless, he was right. I asked myself if she had done anything during the entire course of our interaction that was particularly noble, heroic or brave. I could not think of anything. The best that it ever got was something along the lines of normal human decency. It regularly fell pretty far below that.

I acknowledge my role in the brokenness. I acknowledge that she did put in some degree of time and effort, especially during a particularly vulnerable time in her life. I think that she did try to trust me, insofar as she was able to. Yet, I was expected to act flawlessly according to her rules in order to maintain that trust, and she felt as if she could act however she wanted toward me and retain mine. I am far from perfect, as are my actions, but this does not make her actions okay. It is as much my fault as hers for letting it happen, even for facilitating it. I presented myself as a doormat for her to walk on. I put up no protests when she went about walking on me. I rewarded her abuse with gifts and attention. The fact still remains: The way that she treated me was wrong.

The question remains. How is this not masochism? If this was the way she treated me, and past behavior is the best predictor of future action, how am I not a fool for wanting second helpings? I believe she is a good person who has treated me in bad ways. The answer must be in our quandary: how can a good person do bad things? There are four possible combinations of goodness and badness in relationships. You can have a good person treat you well, a bad person treat you poorly, a good person treat you poorly, or a bad person treat you well. Let’s look at each of these.

Good/good is the simplest story. Take Beren and Luthien. He fights hard for her, but he has some reason to fight. He fights the outside world, he does not fight her. Little about this story should be surprising. Let’s call it classical love. (Of course, how many of these stories are left? With the rescinding of all of our safeties, we bear our wounds inside, and our fears are the new dragons. )

Bad/bad is another simple story, although a more tragic one. We’ll call it masochistic ‘love.’ Some people will actually seek out bad people who treat them poorly. A good guy or girl who treats them well is seen as just not all that exciting. Some people want a fixer-upper, someone they can fix or save or whatever. Some people think they suck, and they want to find a mate that agrees. The guy or girl who thinks too highly of them is simply asking them to be more than they want to be. Far easier to live up to low expectations. So this sort of a relationship accepts or even seeks out brokenness.

I don’t know what Bad/Good looks like. My model is incomplete. So sue me. (Of course, I would view good actions from a bad person as somewhat suspect.)

The last option is the Good/Bad. Where the good person treats you poorly. To state it more precisely, the person worth fighting for mocks your fighting. So there are two aspects to this: you must see something in the person worth fighting for, and you must realize that the person themselves will be your adversary in the fighting. As opposed to masochistic ‘love,’ this kind of love does not accept the brokenness. It involves an element of hope, hope that the relationship can be redeemed. It does not allow itself to be walked on, it respects the free will of the other, but it offers itself as a sacrifice. This kind of love asks God to forgive as it is nailed to the cross by its beloved. This is redemptive love.

Where does this leave me? I am unhappy with the way she treated me. I feel like she walked all over my heart. Yet I think she is worth fighting for. But, Something Corporate aside, I can’t save her. I’m not her Savior. I can’t untangle all the threads, I can’t heal all the wounds. I won’t be walked on, and I will respect her choices. But I will fight until this is taken from me. This leaves me only my prayers. I have faith that God is in this somehow. I have hope that He will do something great. I love her, as He teaches me to love. Any relationship between her and I would require redemption. I cannot work redemption. Certainly not here. So I will pray for a Redeemer.

I once said something to her about three vindications. The first one I wanted was her realization that the way she treated me was wrong. The second one was that something positive could exist between her and I. The third was that she would become great. I was once willing to abandon the first two for the sake of the third. Now that I have nothing to lose, I’ll go for broke. I pray for all three.

(This fast seems to be His way of pointing out to me all the places in my heart where I harbor distrust for Him. A tour de force of my fallenness. No wonder all the saints kept talking about how fallen they were and how big jerks they were all the time. Of course, you have to identify a problem in order to fix it. He is healing those places, usually involving some form of me being humbled. Not super fun, but worth it. Anyways…)

(As a totally unrelated prelude (itself a contradiction in terms,) I think I understand a bit of why Solomon tells us that to bless an enemy is to heap burning coals upon their head. There is not so much difference between love and hate, I think. The neurotransmitters, the hormones, really, it is chemically very similar. It is the state of mind that draws the distinction. The chemicals give us the magnitude, but the heart gives the feeling direction. And the difference between love and hate is fear. If someone hates you, and you love them in return, you provoke them to a sort of jealousy. You show them that the only difference between you and them is fear. I have realized this in seeing how much love and hate were mixed in my own heart, and how when I let fear enter into my loves, they started to become hateful. On a happier note, I also saw how a lot of hate became love once I surrendered my fear.)

I do not believe that God intends for me to be a Don Quixote or a Captain Ahab. I do not believe He is cruel. I believe that He is good, trustworthy and faithful. Now more than ever, because I must. Perhaps I am in rebellion. Rebellion does not feel like this. The scheming, the rage, all those implements of fear and the enemy, I don’t feel them. More importantly, rebellion drags you away from Him. Yet, through this circumstance, I am closer to Him than ever before. Perhaps He is teaching me something. I once felt that, like in Legends of the Fall, she was the rock I broke myself upon. The crazy thing is that, last time, when more than ever I should have broke, I did not. So perhaps she is the anvil upon which I am forged. And maybe that is why He kept bringing me back to be broken upon her. It wouldn’t be unprecedented (Kirkegaard, etc.) So I will learn to love the anvil as one of His tools, to love the forge, and the fire as His implements. As long as I keep learning and drawing in to Him, I will not call this rebellion. I’ll reassess if that quits happening.

So at some point, the sword is forged, and the anvil and fire are no longer necessary (or perhaps a new one becomes necessary.) How will I know that this story is over? I hope that somehow all these crazy dreams come true. Then this story ends and a far less broken one begins. If not, then I hope to know the story is over from whence it came: my sense of destiny. I want my deep dreams to break lock on her. More on the corporeal level, there is the mechanical stop of marriage. I don’t know how I would find out, but if she gets married, these prayers cannot continue without becoming rebellion. Or perhaps something I have not yet seen will change my heart. But as long as He teaches, I will try to learn. He teaches me to love her, but perhaps in the process I learn something deeper. In learning to love someone worth fighting for, yet someone who has deeply and willfully wounded me, I learn something about how He can love a wretch like me.

This is in response to Tara's comment. She rocks. I was going to write it as a comment, except I always take way to many words to say anything, so it ended up being a page before I realized it. Hope you had a fun weekend.

Hi Tara!

Thanks for your comment! I am very excited for ‘ya, sounds like you are doing awesome. I’m sure you’ll do rockingly at Law School (Better you than me, I don’t have the patience to endure Tort Law, innumerable findings, or Crit Scholars. Hehe.) You rock crazy hard-core. (And all other sorts of positive statements.)

So I was thinking about what you said. I embrace your thoughts on the growth of love (arrgh… I’m speaking in academic-ese. Oh well.) We should not have view love through the eyes of scarcity. Even after great tragedy, our hearts can grow to accommodate new love. If the rooms of our heart have been filled with clutter, I believe we can continue to build additions. Like the mother of many children, who finds that with each new one, she still has more than enough love for all of them. So from that perspective, we don’t have to push anybody out to make room for new love. Love is poured out, not rationed. Thank you for pointing this out.

I would nuance what you said (by adding a degree of dynamic tension with… just kidding, I’m not that bad…) by noting the different types of loves. None of them involve scarcity, but one of them involves exclusivity. The love of friends involves no exclusivity. A friend is glad when their friend becomes richer in relationships with other friends. The love of affection is equally non-exclusive… loving one place or circumstance more does not mean that I must love another less. Certainly Agape love (the unconditional love of God) is in no way exclusive. He pours it out on all, and we should do the same with charity (in its original meaning, derived from Charis in the Greek.) Charity teaches us to pour ourselves out for others, without regard for reciprocity. Neither friend-love, affection-love, nor charity-love require us to forsake all others in order to love one.

Romantic love is different. ‘To have and to hold…forsaking all others… until death do us part.‘ A friend can say with true earnestness, ’Ryan, I hope you had a great time hanging out with Peter last night.’ I cannot imagine a husband who earnestly loved his wife saying ’Honey, I hope you had a great date with John last night.’ Exclusivity is a pre-condition for Eros. This is why God uses romantic imagery to describe His relationship with us in the Bible (and hence the description of God as jealous.) Romantic love expressed in a committed relationship involves a degree of possession. Not the twisted, demanding possession of an unhealthy relationship; not the consuming possession of taking, but the possession of giving, receiving and treasuring. ’I am my beloved’s and she is mine.’ I give myself to her as she gives herself to me. I receive her gift of self, and I treasure it; I trust her to do the same with mine. And here is the nuance: I must have all of my heart if I am to give it away. You cannot give away what you don’t have. By rights, all of my romantic love should belong to my wife. I am determined that it will, and I will pray for as long as it takes to recover my heart in order to give to her, whoever she ends up being.

I am not trying to describe a fictional fairy-land without clouds and rain. I know that everything happens imperfectly on this side of the fall. We see through a glass clouded, and all my actions will be incomplete and flawed. I might only be able to get part way to where I want to go, but I will not go any of the way if I don’t have some idea of where it is that I want to go. I might not make it. But I’ll keep walking, anyways. After all, I’ve got forever to walk. And my Guide is as good as they come. (He’s not safe, though.)

I truly appreciate your thoughts. May you be greatly blessed. I look forward to hearing more from you. :)

Dave

Mutual Assured Destruction, we called it. Really, it was a new expression of something very old. We always want to have the last word. It is a measure of control, I think: even in total defeat, you have some ability to hurt them the way they hurt you. In this, we ensure that we are never left totally defenseless. We always retain some degree of control, for we have that last line of defense. Or so we tell ourselves.

Domestic relationships are not so different from international relations. People build last lines of defense as surely as nations do. Just because we use words instead of plutonium doesn’t mean our weapons are any less deadly. There were two flavors of nuclear weapons: first-strike weapons and retaliatory weapons. In relationship there are also two flavors of deterrent weaponry.

First-strike weapons were about leverage. Following the Second World War, the Soviet Union had far more troops than the United States in Germany. America implemented a policy of Massive Retaliation. Any Russian invasion would be countered with nuclear weapons. Within a relationship, we field the weapon of the ultimatum. It usually starts with ‘If you do such and such.’ The way that it ends depends on the specific relationship… sometimes with ‘I will tell so and so something,’ sometimes with words like divorce, always with some flavor of ’I will hurt you worse than you can imagine.’

Retaliatory weapons are about equalizing pain. There is a deep desire, born out of a feeling of helplessness and vulnerability, a desire to hurt the other back. Revenge promises us control by ensuring that we have the last word. ‘I want you to hurt as bad as you made me hurt,’ is its cry. So the dictator, seeing the collapse of his regime, launches his nuclear missiles at the cities of his enemy. If I’m going down, at least I’ll take some of them with me. I think this is not so unusual a thought. A lot of us (myself included) clothe it in nice Christian-ese words, because we are unwilling to be honest with ourselves. (One common Christian-ese tactic is to forgive people for things they do not need to be forgiven for. For example: ’I forgive you for telling me I was wrong (when I was wrong.)’) We are certainly not original in thinking this: it is one of the oldest thoughts in this universe. We walk in charred and sulfurous footsteps when these are our thoughts.

Our pain teaches us how to be vindictive. Pain teaches us fear, and love mixed with fear is hate. Like love, hate’s primary desire is to promulgate itself. As love is spread through mercy, hate is spread through revenge. So in the aftermath of pain, revenge becomes the order of the day. We may do stupid things, like ’I’m not giving him his T-shirt back.’ We might (God forbid) do horrible things, such as destroying millions of lives to avenge an insult from an art professor. Most of us end up somewhere in between. We find some way to hurt the other person, thereby correcting the perceived imbalance of pain. We try to empower ourselves by hurting the other. But our retribution is limited, constrained by the laws of society. So we reach for the weapon of the hypothetical. Our imaginations allow us to play God, writing a story in which we are vindicated. ’One day’ becomes our avenue for revenge when actual revenge is impractical.

With the frankness of the profane, Reel Big Fish sings ‘one day, maybe she’ll come back to me, and I’ll say why don’t you go f*** yourself.’ The freedom of the hypothetical allows us to construct a world where the other will comes crawling back to us, just as vulnerable as we were when they hurt us. We then hurt the other just as viciously as they hurt us. Then we say something to the effect of ‘now you know how it feels,’ or something about the chickens roosting, depending on our individual preferences in rhetoric. With all the hurting equalized, all somehow becomes well with the world. So in anticipation of that day of vindication, we table the matter and go about the business of the day. We get our revenge, but without any of the time or trouble of actually going about it. Even those of us who believe ourselves better than this generally have some distillate of these thoughts stored somewhere in the depths of our hearts, locked behind doors we don’t dare to open. It generally seeps out in forms harder to recognize, poisoning our ability to trust others.

So these are our last lines of defense. The promise of overwhelming pain, the threat that ’I will make you hurt the same way you hurt me.’ The nuclear weapons of our hearts. Just as nuclear weapons are closely guarded and hidden away in silos, we lock away our arsenal in our darkest dreams, we hide it until we absolutely need it. We save it for the day when we are utterly shattered and broken, lying helpless and vulnerable on the floor, for they promise us that we will still have something to call upon on that day. We will have a last line of defense; we can always have the last word, even if it means there are no more words ever. (Remember Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew) They promise us one last hope of vindication.

In this promise hides the betrayal. We already have one last hope of vindication, Job’s hope: ‘I believe that my redeemer lives.’ This is the only hope that matters, the only one that we need. The only one worth having. The enemy of our soul seeks to rob us of this one real hope. Our last line of defense is nothing more than his insurance policy. On the day when we are most broken, the day we need God more than we ever have before, our first instinct will be to look to our own strength for vindication. We play right into the enemy’s hands.

Like all other false defenses, we must throw away our last lines of defense. We must abandon all threats, we must reject the weapon of the hypothetical. We must renounce all confidence that our flesh will vindicate us. There is one armor: the Armor of God. The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. There is only one hope, one last hope, one best hope: the hope of our Lord. He and He alone will vindicate us.

I ask your indulgence while I tell you a story from my life. Two years ago, I remember feeling very walked on by C. (Please reserve your psychological analyses for the time being. Passive-Aggressive, Compliant-Nonresponsive boundary issue, and the like. Looking back, I was a different person. I think that ‘me now’ would be pretty annoyed with ‘me then’ were we to meet. A bit too Twilight Zone, though. And a bit too cliché.) I remember feeling like she held all the cards, knew it, and was playing them (and me) as much as she could. That terrible, vulnerable, helpless feeling. I remember sitting and fuming over some stupid thing, something along the lines of a one sentence email response to a letter I put a lot of time into. The resentment starts building. So the rouge state starts its nuclear weapons program because it feels bullied by the superpower.

Later, when things inevitably fell apart, I remember feeling lectured as if I was some student of hers. As if this was some pedantic lesson and she was the instructor getting frustrated because the pupil was slow to learn. And I could not respond. I looked for something, some way to have the last word, some way to equalize the balance of power. The enemy’s weapons strike directly at the core of who we are, just as an assassin’s sword. He loaned me a blade on that day. Something subtle but vicious, a curse directed at the very heart of who she was. I never used it, but I surely left it in my armory. I would not really admit this to myself, in fact, I even forgot it for a while. Buried it deep in my psyche, in that place we put all those terribly ungodly thoughts that we are not willing to face. Somewhere, though, I knew it was there, stored in the scabbard of ‘one day.’

I will not tell you what the curse was. I will not speak curses over her. I will speak only blessings. To speak such things is to give them power, and this thing will not be spoken ever. I will tell you how it ends, and this should give you some sense of its flavor: ‘may the only stories in your life be found in books.’ It promised a degree of safety. ‘One day,’ when I ran into her and her hypothetical husband, when they said saccharine, patronizing words, that day when I was naked and embarrassed and without defense, I would have something to say. Something as devastating as their words. I would have the last word. I am not proud of these thoughts. God has since dealt with me on this.

I remember the day she attacked me over email. I was at the house of one of my accountability partners. My head was spinning. To have hopes so high, to trust someone, to be so utterly destroyed, I wanted something to say, some rejoinder. It was ‘one day.’ The day I was naked and without defense, when she had hurt way in every possible way. I felt patronized, mocked, wounded, I felt completely betrayed. If there was ever a day to fall back to the last line of defense, it was that day. Praise God I did not. It was only through His power. I prayed over the response I sent, prayed to forgive her, prayed that she would be blessed. My flesh, my fears and my enemy wanted to me to curse her. I blessed her defiantly. I found the page in my journal where I had written that curse, and I tore it out. On that day, God finally freed me of my last line of defense. On that day, He became my only hope of vindication.

There are some curses that become blessings in certain contexts. Humanity was cursed with death, yet in a world of sin, death is a blessing. CSL points this out in several of his books. In the story Children of Dune, Alia is tormented by dreams of paths that she can never follow. She proves herself unable to control these dreams, and they drive her mad. It is hardly a blessing to have such dreams rattling around your head. I believe that we can make choices that render us incapable of walking certain paths. Sometimes we can run so far in our fear that God must give us a new path, and someone else must be given the path we were meant to walk. There are some choices that can never be undone, and even as God weaves them into His plans, He cuts other strands in the weaving. This began to occur to me in the story at hand. I will state this frankly. She has a tremendous destiny. I have always believed this. However, if I were to project outcomes without believing in miracles, I would guess she will probably find a weak-willed guy she can fashion into her own image, one who will let her hide in her fears for the rest of her life. With such a man, she would not be able to walk those paths that I believe are set out for her. In that case, I would view it as quite possible that God would do her an act of mercy in taking that destiny from her and giving it to another. Yet, there is a problem with me saying these things; not with the rightness or wrongness of this assessment, but with rather my right to make it.

Our enemy is subtle. When we lay down our rights, he immediately tries to find ways to make us pick them back up. I laid down my right of retribution. I laid down my right to hurt her the way she had hurt me. And he immediately set about finding ways to lead me to recover that right. He knew that I would not curse her, so he began to reinvent my curse into a blessing. A blessing, but a last line of defense. A way of equalizing things. I did not see it at first. It seemed to line up with the story of one of my friends (told in Plan B.) But there are things that one must have the right to say. A parent disciplines their child. For a stranger to do so is unthinkable. I prayed, asked God to show me if this was from Him. He answered. Not that I was right or that I was wrong in my assessment, but that it just wasn’t my place. I am not God. I am not in a place to pray that her destiny would be taken from her, even if it would be a blessing. Even more so, that prayer would have too much hate mixed with love. There is not even a hint of ’I told you so’ in the words of Ezekiel or Jeremiah. I do not believe that would be true for my prayers. So I will let those prayers be prayed by someone who can pray them more purely and simply than I.

Blessing or curse, I cast down this last line of defense. God is my last, best, and only hope of vindication, and in Him I place my trust. I’ve heard you can de-activate a nuclear weapon, that you can safe it so that it can never hurt anyone. Maybe the same is true for a malediction. Now it ends, ‘may the only stories in your life be His stories for you.’

You have to admit the whole thing is terribly Germanic. Hoping against hope, fighting to the death for the lost cause, these are the things of Norse myths. Odin and Thor against the trolls, fighting on knowing they will lose. They don’t care. They fight anyways. The Riders of Rohan, chanting ‘death’ before riding down the impossible numbers of Orcs. In the words of Kahlil Gibran, ‘the moth that dies around the light.’ Romantic, I guess. In the classical sense. Loving the one who will never return it. And that’s the problem. I never really liked the classical romantics. I’ll take a cliché happy ending any day over a Dostoyevskian beautiful catastrophe. (I like the parts of the Russkaya Dusha that don’t involve thousand page books.)

Here’s the crazy thing. I think that I actually might win. Frodo believes in his fool’s hope all the way until the end. All the way until it comes true. Saxon myths were about the mighty conquering warrior. Norse myths were about the tenacity of valor. Tolkien fuses the two. Thor faces impossible odds. Beowulf wins. Frodo does both. Christ did both. The carpenter confronts all the powers of darkness, death and hell. And He wins. Eleven fishermen and a turncoat preacher challenge the greatest empire this world has ever known. Rome fell. Christ rose. Because of Him, I hope.

It is strange to me Christians are so unwilling to hope for things that are right in front of us. Christ asks us, ’how can you say you love God, who you have not seen, when you do not love your neighbor, who you have seen?’ Perhaps it is the same for hope. As the creeds remind us, we believe in the resurrection from the dead. We believe in the impossible. How can we say that we hope that He will do the impossible, when we are not even willing to hope that He will do the difficult. Surely it is easier to reconcile a relationship than to raise the dead. And I believe that dead men rise.

Sometimes an either/or is really a both/and. The apostles spread the Gospel with the tenacious hope of a Frodo, yet they face a martyr’s death with the valor of a Thor. Ragnarok is fought for the next world. The Norse gods do not hope for victory on that day, instead they hope for vindication on a greater day. Stephen does not rise from under the rocks on the day of his stoning, but he rises in Paul on a greater day. There is a strength in the valor of Ragnarok. When you have accepted death, you fight like a madman. You hold nothing back, and you cannot lose heart. You are already totally committed, everything is already sacrificed, there is nothing that your enemy can take from you. Yet, in this is a paradox. The one who hopes for victory on the day of battle does not accept death. That man sees victory and victory alone. He will not allow death to interfere. He will fight on after his body is broken, his bloody knuckles dragging him to the goal. I do not think we need to decide between hope and valor. We fight for victory today, yet we are assured of vindication on a greater day. Paul says it better. ’To live is Christ, to die is gain.’