Divine Plagiarism

I’ve always had a hard time with trust. Let me revise that. I’ve always had a hard time with anything other than absolute trust or complete distrust. One hundred percent or not at all. It is not that I didn’t trust. Much to the contrary, I think that my trust was often given away far too easily. But it was never given in shades. I assumed someone to be absolutely trustworthy almost automatically, and I trusted them as such. When that trust failed, I would feel tremendously betrayed. The absolute trust would turn into complete distrust. Not forever, usually. With little or no real reconciliation, I would find myself completely trusting that person again. Repeat cycle. Over and over. Like a driver that only knows full acceleration and hard braking (or a pilot who uses full deflection control movements only,) I still made the journey from point A to point B, but only after all loose articles came dislodged and all nerves became frayed. I think I called it loyalty. I do not think this was ever good.

The hardest thing for me was when someone deserved trust by the numbers. When a parent, an authority figure, or a pastor failed me, the sting was the sharpest. By virtue of their role, they were supposed to act in a certain way. I trusted them to do so. When they fell short, it felt as if they deliberately betrayed me. At the Academy, I remember when a chaplain had stepped out of the way out of a bureaucratic steamroller, sacrificing a cadet Christian leadership group on the altar of his career. I was on the receiving end of that steamroller. Thus began one of the hardest years of my life. I had the hardest time wrapping my head around the fact that a man who wears a cross on his uniform could care so little about it. I expected a Jesus and found a Judas. So I must ask myself where the fault lies. I wanted it to be his fault for being a Judas. But I question whether it wasn’t my fault for expecting a Jesus.

The scriptures tell us to guard our hearts. Jesus never tells us to abandon discernment. Even in His relationship with us, He invites us to ‘taste and see.’ Paul commends the church in Thessalonica for checking His counsel against scripture. Discernment allows us to guard our hearts and still trust others. We are told not to throw our pearls to swine; we are told to discern in our trusting. If we decide to cast away our pearls regardless, we rob the people the pearls were meant for. Discernment tells us which is which. My deepest wounds have been from Christians. I guess I had assumed that it was safe to leave my defenses down when I was with family. I forgot that people called by His name are still people. Are still fallen. Like me. Here’s the rub. I had never asked whether I was myself worthy of absolute trust. I mean, you can’t really demand of someone else something that you aren’t capable of yourself. All blessings come with responsibilities. If one is unwilling or incapable of taking that responsibility, the blessing becomes a burden. By trusting someone absolutely, I am asking them to carry that trust. Absolute trust demands absolute perfection, and I only know One man who can bear that expectation. And He’s not me.

It would be easier at this point to split the question into two: one of intention and one of capability. It would be nicer to say that there are good people and bad people, but sometimes the good ones let you down. You may have the most kind-hearted five year old in the world, but you are a fool if you trust him with your life. He can’t handle his own, much less yours. I’m not sure, though, that we can exonerate ourselves simply on the claim of ‘good intentions.’ Very few people are, umm, tough-minded enough to really consider what they are doing as evil while they are in the process of doing it. We generally find some way to justify our actions to ourselves. Some things we may not yet be aware are wrong; we are all in different places. Accordingly, the distinction between intention and capability really is more a function of perspective, one that shows up in shades. As should our trust.

God has been challenging my assumptions on trust in a rather unique way. I’d like to provide you a window on my learning process. Here are two stories, prefaced with a personal note. The characters in these stories are people I respect, and two of them I know personally and care about deeply. I write with candor, but I pray not with unkindness. And if you know me, I hope you can’t tell who these people are.

Paul writes that an Church Elder should not be a new believer, as they are liable to fall victim to pride. I think a function of pride, or a symptom perhaps, is a need to control things. I think I finally understand why. My friend H. was heavily involved in campus ministry, occupying several Christian leadership posts. He is also a new believer, having accepted Christ three years ago. Thirty when he got saved, he read the Bible and Christian classics with a vengeance. He admirably seemed to want to make up for lost time, catching up in spiritual age to his physical and emotional age. He was still in his honeymoon with Jesus. The newly married couple is committed and fully in love. They may even know a lot about each other. But it isn’t till they have had a few real fights and learn how to reconcile them that they approach maturity together. Salvation takes time to permeate through one’s heart. It seems to spread, drawing in more and more parts of one’s life. But that spreading is not instantaneous, and you can’t rush it. There is nothing more dangerous than the Christian who paints whitewash over his heart, instead of letting the Spirit wash it from the inside. And this is the temptation for the new believer who finds themselves in leadership.

We expect Christian leaders to have all the answers. We expect them to have it all figured out. (Here we see our all or nothing again.) There is not room for them to have the fights with God that a young believer needs to weather. So the easy out is the whitewash. Paint everything in Christian-ese and throw Bible verses on top of whatever views you already had. Which is where the danger comes in. Plates in the Earth move against each other all the time. When they catch on an edge of rock, the tension starts to build, and build, until it lets go all at once in an earthquake.

So I think to the director of campus ministries for the university, and what the decision must have been like to bring H. on staff. Another laborer to work the fields. Good, and sorely needed. And he has done good, to be sure. But there is danger in this. I worry that perhaps the consequences of that choice will be harmful in the long run. I hope not. H. is my friend. But I would rather have him fall more in love with Jesus than to have him do all sorts of good things for Jesus. Spiritual maturity allows both of those to happen at once.

Recently, I was praying about getting involved in campus ministry again. I noticed a prayer request for help at a local campus with the same group, so I pray about it. It feels like a God thing, so I email H. He sends back the contact info for helping, but in the same email he tells me that I should probably focus my efforts elsewhere, that they wouldn’t need me. I email the local director anyways, and we get coffee two weeks later. He tells me that he had been praying for some volunteers about a week before I emailed him. It still feels like a God thing.

The point is not so much the sequence of events. I had learned. There was a time when I would have been hurt by H.’s discouragement. But I had learned not to trust him absolutely, but instead in accordance with his capacity to bear it. To steal Switchfoot’s words, he is a crooked soul trying to stand up straight. As am I. So I trusted accordingly, set my expectations and acted in accordance with that trust. I maintained the relationship and the terms. This may seem cold, but here is the other option. I trust her absolutely, he fails to deserve absolute trust, I feel betrayed and trust her not at all. I know that story from experience. I like the new story better.

Which brings us to our second episode. I have been reading a good deal about missions work recently. I ran across a Christian thinker who cared deeply about the indigenous missionary movement. Initially, I start reading his books and agreeing 100%. We do too much Jesus Camp instead of spreading the gospel. Certainly. We spend too much time and money on things that are not the Great Commission. Definitely. We need to rethink our methods. Yes. There is no place for Western Missionaries anymore. Hmm. His words start to sting a bit. I feel challenged, keep going with it. But some of the chords start sounding sour. Certain things don’t jive with my experience, some of his facts just don’t check. There is an undercurrent of something broken in his words. So I want to disagree completely, call him misguided and not listen anymore. This is a familiar story, even though it is outside the context of personal relationship. I pray for discernment.

I find it. The broken chords come apart, the sour notes isolated. First of three: the zeal of a man called. The man who sees the world through the eyes of a vision, but one who cannot understand how that vision looks in the eyes of the world. And he is called, I believe. The problem is that vision is so clear to him that he feels as if it should be clear to anyone following hard after God. So if they can’t see, it’s their lack of faith, or it’s sin. I am quite familiar with this failing, it is one of mine. So when people ask him legitimate questions, about accountability and the like, he responds poorly. Second of three: A man who feels strong resentment toward colonialism. And rightfully so. I was on the missions field, I saw it. But there is still anger there, and it still does hamper his work. You can hear it when he says things like ‘I will not yield the term missionary to them,’ and then he proceeds to define it in terms that exclude the people who he feels are excluding him. Third of three: A man who does not understand that church politics, though loathsome, are not personal. There is a lot of ‘not invented here’ syndrome in all churches, not just western ones. Believe me, as much as I like the Ukrainian Baptists, their church bureaucracy is slower than any other organization I have ever seen in accepting change. A man advocating radical change in church thinking should expect to run into resistance, especially when he uses the tack ‘what you have been doing is a waste of time and money.’ Nobody likes to hear that. This is simply a function of people. In reality, it wasn’t that everyone was against him, or that they were prejudiced, but just that there was a lot of stupidity and he was advocating for change. His insecurities in this regard also undermine his work. But insecurity, impatience and resentment are common flaws, ones I share. None of them are a reason to reject out of hand a man with a vision. But all of them are reasons to take that vision with a grain of salt.

This dear brother matures a bit in his second book. Praise God for the things he is doing. I hold him in high regard. But not absolute regard. He’s not Jesus. And once I got that straight, I could hear what he was saying without the inevitable cycles of expectation and disappointment. Judging from the recent well handled New Life Church controversy, I’d like to believe we have all grown up in this regard from the days of the Swaggerts. Praise God for that.

These are the stories. My conclusion sounds cold, I know. It sounds as if it is a reluctance to trust. But it is not at all. It is not just about pearls and pigs. It is about sustainable relationships between broken and fallen people. I am not deserving of the absolute trust of another. I do not know what dark closets there still are in my heart. Even with all of me I do know, I am far from perfect. I will fail you. I cannot bear the weight of anyone’s absolute trust. I am sure to disappoint, if anyone expects perfection from me. I am not perfect. Likewise, it would not even be fair for me to expect another to bear the weight of my absolute trust. We trust as much as we can, and a little more, as God teaches us to love more. Intention and capability come together to form trustworthiness. As He fixes the brokenness that makes us untrustworthy, we can trust more. So this is the best answer for a fallen world. May God reconcile two broken and fallen people to each other as He reconciles us to Him, for only He deserves absolute trust. Nor is this borne out of a fear of pain. There is a difference between trust and love. Both can get you hurt, certainly. But spend your pain well. Don’t just throw it away.

So this brings me back to the present story. C. By the numbers, she looks absolutely trustworthy. And I think this was one of the hardest things for me. When I told my good friend R. that I was praying for her again, he told me ‘I don’t trust her.’ I remember that now. I also remember arguing with a friend of mine over whether girls were worthy of respect at all. His argument was they were not, as most girls would like you in inverse proportion to the respect you showed them. I cited C. as my counter-argument, telling him that still, despite everything, I would have put my life in her hands. She proved me wrong. I should never trusted her to that degree. It was a trust she was not capable of bearing. In the strangest of ways, I burdened her with my trust. I would have loved her more by trusting her less. It is a lesson I have learned from. I do not trust her. I love her still. I told R. one thing right, at least. ‘I’m not trusting her. I’m trusting God.’ This is still true. Perhaps trust can still be built. This time, it’ll be built in shades.