Divine Plagiarism

Jesus says that many will say ’Lord, Lord,’ and He will say ‘I never knew you.’ I think I had always taken that as more or less a theoretical consideration. I guess I never thought about how that played out. I don’t think I ever wanted to.

So a friend of a friend was caught in the middle of a pretty crazy situation a while back. Let’s call that friend J. J. is caught in the middle of a war zone, and tries to find her way out of a country that was coming apart around her. I have told this story before. Last time I told it, it was with a degree of annoyance about her attacks on my friends. That is gone in this retelling, replaced by a bone-chilling fear and a sincere desire to be wrong. One of my friends, reading the things J. wrote, commented on the tremendous rage that she had for Israel. I think I excused it, citing the whole ‘Israeli bombs falling around her’ thing and her histrionic tendencies. But it was so blind, so unthinking, that I wonder if there hadn’t been a darker note to that broken chord. I wonder if my friend was not right in thinking that J.‘s hatred was out of place for a Christian even given the circumstances. I’m not so sure I should have discarded my friend’s observation so lightly. I should have listened closer. There was one thing I should have heard, one thing I could not hear because it was silent. Looking back it seems very loud: She had no sense of God in the crisis whatsoever. Neither pleas for help, nor submission to His will, nor the rage of a lover spurned. Nothing at all. And this scares me more than I could have imagined.

My friend L. survived a helicopter crash a few years back. In the months before that flight, he had been on a spiritual plateau in his walk with God. He tells me that in the moments before the chopper hit the ground, he prayed ‘Lord, your will be done.’ Looking back, he finds it strange how much serenity he found in that moment. He expected to come to in His arms. God did not call him home that day. In that moment when all the layers were stripped away, Jesus was still there. With what L. thought was his last sentence, his first thought was to spend it in conversation with God. And a good conversation it was.

This is, of course, not the only possible conversation with God that one could have in those circumstances. I think of the deal-making prayers. ‘Save me from this, and I’ll give You whatever You ask.’ The Jean Valjean prayers, praying in earnest for delivery, pledging allegiance to Him in return. Or the less pious foxhole prayers, where the man under fire barters with God for his life. ‘I’ll straighten up and fly right, really I will, if you bring me through this.’ After God upholds His part of the bargain, the terms of the barter generally get re-negotiated. Regardless, the first instinct of the foxhole saint is to look to God. When he needs deliverance, something deep in his heart tells him where to go. When all the layers are stripped away, some sense of God still lives in that man’s heart of hearts. Even if his Divine conversation was not as enlightened, it was still a conversation.

There are even less positive conversations. Ones where accusations and lamps are thrown. I think of C.S.L.’s ‘A Grief Observed.’ When his life wife dies, he throws at God all the things that we think in our heart of hearts and never bring ourselves to say because of our religiosity. But all of Lewis’ layers are stripped away, and with it his religiosity. But Jesus is still there in his heart of hearts. So Lewis’ first instinct is toward Him, even if it is with the rage of a lover betrayed. He feels as if his Lover asked him to trust, only to break his heart. He fights with the resurgent rage of the atheist, once so well acquainted to him: ‘There is no God, and I hate Him.’ But at least he’s talking. A shouting match may not be the happiest of conversations, but it still is a conversation. And afterwards, the lovers often find themselves reconciled. Lewis did.

These men, whether in love or rage, still turned to God in their moments of deepest honesty. Lewis tells it well: a man at war with God is far closer to salvation that one indifferent. Christ tells is better, by way of John: ‘be hot or cold, or be spit out.’ J’s silence was deafening. In that hour when everything was stripped away, there was no thought about Him one way or another. It seemed like Jesus was left behind in one of the layers stripped off by the crisis. In her heart of hearts, it seemed there was no conversation with Him at all. As if He had never been there to start with. After the crisis, I think that she likely clothed herself in her discarded layers once again, and accordingly relearned how to express thoughts in Christian-ese. And this is exactly what scares me.

You see, by the numbers, J. is a good Christian. She has a good Christian resume, attending all the right campus Bible studies, going to the right churches. She has good Christian friends, who get along with her well, and she converses well with them in fluent Christian-ese. She has an excellent working knowledge of Christianity. She would be an excellent candidate for Christian leadership. And this is what scares the crap out of me: She may not know Him. When all of her coverings were stripped away, He was not there. There was an image of Him carried in those coverings, but He was not there in her heart of hearts. Here is what terrifies me: By the books, she should know Him. I would have assumed that she did, without question. I would not have witnessed to her, because I would have assumed she didn’t need me to. But I could have been wrong not to. She may have been the dying doctor surrounded by cures, and I would have never known on this side of eternity.

When that thought hit me, I forgot everything I had felt toward her. Compassion washed over me in a wave, but brought with it a cold, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I just started praying. I prayed that if she does know Him, that she would grow in Him and that the experience would bring her closer to Him. I prayed that if she does not, that she would come to know Him in Spirit and in Truth. I prayed that God would reach this woman’s heart, whether or not she knows Him. I really don’t know. But it terrifies me. The prospect of a girl who I would have completely assumed I would see on the other side of eternity not going absolutely chills me. Because if it is true of her, then it is true of others. Of more people who are my friends, people I may even be at Bible studies with, or other people whose ticket to Heaven I assume is paid in full. I wonder how many of us, when all the layers are stripped from our hearts, would find that our relationship with God was only found in those external layers, not in our heart of hearts. This is not a happy thought, but I can find little in Scripture to banish it. I don’t want it to be true. So, at least in this one case, I pray that I am wrong. And if I was right, I pray that I would be made wrong retroactively by her finding Him even now.