Divine Plagiarism

Perhaps this was the ultimate irony: the academics gave me a degree that equipped me to kill many people before I had killed my first man as a soldier. I am on some level grateful that I did the latter before being confronted with the former. With two security studies degrees, I could have easily been in a position where the ‘send’ button on my email would have been a live trigger. Black ink is much easier to stomach than red blood, so we spill it far more readily. I do not doubt that there are times to spill both, and by virtue of my calling I am willing to do so. But I am glad that I saw it first in red. In the International Security class on op-plans and strategy memos, they don’t show you the man lying in a pool of his own blood, fading on Infrared as it cools.

Nor should they. Starched suits should not be splattered with blood. The decision room is not the place for reflections on the horrors of the fall, lest those horrors be magnified through inaction. Reason must trump the fires of emotion, lest we fear war too much and become slaves. But reason cannot abandon emotion entirely, lest we fear war too little and become monsters. George Orwell tell us that we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready to do harm to those who would hurt us. But there must be less rough men who stand ready to unleash those men, fully understanding the consequences of doing so.

‘Nasty, brutish and short,’ I think it goes. Hobbes’ famous apologetic for the structures of civilization. Under the shelter of governance, we are kept safe from the cruelties of the natural world. It is no doubt true to some degree. But ‘civilized’ people are generally just more subtle in their nastiness to each other. Brutish urges still dominate ‘civilized’ society, even when watered-down for their cinema, theatrical and literary presentations. I wonder if the cumulative costs of our prolonged longevity do not end up costing us more life once you subtract the time spent in traffic. This is the world after the fall… different flavors of nasty, brutish and short. But there are oases. So you make life where you find it.

This was the most surprising thing, initially: life at war was just life. You think that it would be some sort of a drastic departure from ‘normal life.’ On one hand, the medieval poets lauding the honor and glory of it all. On the other hand, the Platoon and Apocalypse Now decrying the horror, the horror of it all. It wasn’t either, just more of the same. This is not to say that it is boring. Just that it wasn’t all that different. This didn’t make it any less significant. A Centurion of the house of Caesar, I now know what it means to be an agent of wrath. I will not forget. (For a more ‘intellectually satisfying’ discussion of wrath, please see the last post on wrath, or the evolution of that line of thought in the note at the end of this post.)

I had one constant prayer, repeated each night and each mission. That all the crews would return home safely, that we would accomplish the things we set out to do, that my enemies would seek mercy before they found justice. I thank God for answering this prayer many, many times. Because of that grace, I didn’t have to deal with killing for quite some time. When things would start to spin up, I would pray, ‘God, this ends how you want. I’m in Your hands.’ Mercifully, it ended without bloodshed many times. But it is war, after all. And at some point it didn’t.

The act of killing itself was not that difficult. I’m no sociopath, just the choice was clear. In raising his weapon, he decided that someone would die that night. I made sure that it wouldn’t be my friends. There is a mercy in this ill-defined battlefield, I think. In the American Civil War, the Great Power Wars, even the First World War, I could imagine people of good will on both sides of the lines. You do your duty nonetheless, and the other man does his, I suppose. I imagine that would be more difficult. Knowing something of backgrounds and context (I am deliberately vague here,) that man wasn’t a freedom fighter, not a poor soul caught in the cruel grasp of fate and lack of opportunity. Blood cried out from the ground, from what they had already done, from what they were planning on doing. These were men I would never let anywhere near anyone I loved or cared about. My love for the people they had already hurt, and the people they would hurt made the choice an easy one. Yet there still and must be a tension: even in their choices they were still beloved children of God.

Killing a nameless, faceless monster is easy. All the Imperial Storm Troopers look alike. I imagine there isn’t much sorrow or nuance in the destruction of the Death Star. But this wasn’t a movie, and these were people, uniquely created to bear the image of God. So this is not as much the slaying of Goliath as the killing of Absalom. And Absalom was mourned. So I mourned these men.

I do not regret killing him. Far from it. But I mourn him nonetheless. I do regret that it had to be done, though. I mourned that precious creations of God chose a path that led to this end. That first night, I realized that something significant had happened, something that needed to be recognized. So I prayed. I asked God that somehow beyond my understanding that He would work outside of time. I prayed that something I could not imagine or understand had happened, and these men were somehow reconciled to Jesus. Like Emeth the Calormene. I closed in a prayer of mourning for each of them. This is a prayer I will repeat in the future, I have little doubt.

So this is life in the Physics of the Fall. Love comes with Pain here. And Wrath with Grief. I wonder what it would look like without it. The Lord is a Warrior, it says. I wonder what it will mean to be a warrior when there are no more wars to fight. Will wrath become a trophy on some heavenly wall, a no-longer-necessary remembrance of ancient battles? Like nail pierced hands and a wounded side? I cannot say. I will perhaps find those answers on the other side of these shadow lands. But I am here now. An agent of wrath. May my hands be His hands.

‘Only in understanding the vastness of God’s wrath can we understand the enormity of His redemption.’

Most of us only know wrath in ugly terms. The same way we know love. What our society calls love is a mixture of about 98% lust and maybe about 2% real love. We breathe over the embers of something that used to be beautiful, and the smoke that rises is hardly recognizable as something that once was fire. So we have the torrid love affairs which burn for about two hours on the silver screen, and burn out two years later in a tepid divorce. Or the fraternity guy who uses his smooth, well-rehearsed lines to snag another girl who will actually believe that he’s not like all the others. Because this is all we know, we try to convince ourselves that it is love. With such a flawed definition, I wonder if the nihilists aren’t correct for data.

The same applies to wrath. What we call wrath is about 98 percent rage. The verbally abusive parent screaming at his wife and child, the high school bully all to ready to fight whenever the slightest provocation offers itself, the vindictive woman determined to make everyone around her feel her pain. They defend themselves primarily through offense, generally out of proportion to any legitimate provocation. And they defend only themselves, never another. Unmeasured, flailing, reckless, it is not surprising that we are loathe to respond when this is all we know of responding. With this conception of wrath, I’d almost have to side with the pacifists.

Rage invalidates wrath no more than lust invalidates love. We do need to get our definitions straight, though, if we are to find a pure wrath. ‘God is love.’ Yet, ‘God is a wrathful God.’ Therefore, wrath must be a function of love. So if lust is fallen love, and rage is fallen wrath, then rage and lust must be wrapped around each other. And so it is. ‘Hell hath no fury’ and all. Lust is suffocating, controlling and selfish. When denied, consumed with jealousy, it rages at its rivals and its intended object. By nature, rage intertwines itself around lust. Therefore, love and wrath must embrace each other somehow.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to love our enemies. He tells us to turn the other cheek to a man who strikes us. He does not tell us to volunteer another’s cheek. If a man punches you in the chest, then bless him. But if he tries to punch your wife in the chest, knock him the frick out. This is wrath. Like love, it is unselfish. You are defending your wife, whom you love. Like love, it is gentle. As gentle as it can be: to show indifference to cruelty is to show cruelty to the innocent. Like love, it is patient. It responds only when its hand is forced. Ultimately, wrath is an aspect of love. Your love for your wife inspires you to respond to those who would hurt her. Wrath is a defending love, and it is rightly just as passionate as a giving love.

Wrath is love, and love is patient. Love waits for an appropriate time to express itself, in obedience to God and in submission to His plan. God places different limits on different expressions of love. Agape love is to be given freely to all. Sexual love is to be confined to the marriage bed. Without restrictions, the unrestrained power of sex would leave a trail of carnage and death in its wake. As it has in our society. It is simply too easy to get it wrong, too easy to confuse sexual love with the myriad forms of lust. So God protects it by placing it in the context of a exclusive lifelong commitment between a man and a woman. Similarly, it should not surprise us that God gives us a context for the defending love. ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.’ Paul reminds us to make room for God’s wrath. We are not at liberty to practice the defending love at whim. It is a love so powerful, so easy to get wrong, that God reserves it for Himself.

Yet His chosen instrument is man. When the Law came, God revoked the right of vendetta. Man was no longer the arbiter of life and death, for only the Creator gives life and only He can take it away. Yet just as soon as He did so, He established the boundaries of His justice, and assigned death to those who trespassed them. And then He established a government of men to enforce His penalties.

Jesus Christ completed the Law. He did not revoke it. Under the Law of Grace, we are freed from the penalties of the Law of Death. That is, if we accept that freedom. If we do not, we are still subject to Death. This world rejected Christ. Therefore, this world is still subject to the Law of Death. A glance at the headlines of the last two millennia should confirm this fact. Romans Thirteen tells us that God still establishes the governing authorities. ‘They do not bear the sword in vain, but they are God’s agents of wrath to put fear into the heart of the evildoer.’ Agents of wrath, authorized by God to bear the sword. And accountable to God for their conduct.

The Law of Death will be undone one day. All the swords will be beaten into ploughshares, and all who bear them will find new work. Praise God for that. On that day there will no longer be a need for the love that defends, for there will never again be anything to defend from. But until that day, let us pray that the merciful would always be better armed than the cruel.

‘Sin boldly; and repent and rejoice in Christ more boldly still.’ - Martin Luther.

In a snippet from one of the most beautiful stories I have read, a man finds himself in a chilly truce with a woman. There are many words that should have been shared, fiery words of anger and love. But neither the guy nor the girl find the courage to voice them or hear them. They end up covering over those words with milquetoast platitudes about friendship, bringing a modicum of stability to their worlds. All hell threatens to break loose should the man decides to break that truce. He does nonetheless, telling her ‘I’d rather fight with the real you than have peace with a caricature.’

Pride is about image. Specifically, it’s about constructing an image for ourselves other than the Imago Dei. Will Farrell, playing an insecure father on a SNL skit, shouts ’I’m important… I drive a Dodge Stratus!’ We may not be so blatant, but we are no less foolish in our idolatries. No graven images, the commandment goes. Our images are engraved on plaques, business cards and diplomas. The quintessential idol of modernity: success. It even comes in a Christian flavor. Perform the correct conditioned responses and you will be rewarded with the respect of Christian-ese culture. Christians are supposed to be joyful, so we paint on a Sunday morning smile and say ‘God bless you’ through our teeth. Christians are supposed to be righteous, so we confine ourselves to acceptably hidden passive-aggressive sins. The image of Christian success. The temptation all the more acute for those in leadership, for they derive their social capital and their livelihood from their performance. ‘I will do these things, because these are the things a Christian leader does. And I’m a Christian leader. Really I am.’ I am a Christian leader, and Christian leaders are supposed to forgive people. So I will say that I forgive them, whether I really do or not. Because I am scared to death of being honest with myself, others or God.

My once-friend and I went through several iterations of ‘forgiving’ each other. We were both Christians in leadership, and undoubtedly we had read some of the same counseling books. Start with the good things about a person, throw in a few verses as you say the things you need to say, conclude with some sort of positive send-off. We both knew the things we should say to each other, the things that would reflect well on the public perceptions of our walk and our Christian social capital. So we said those things through gritted teeth and fake smiles. In exactly the same way that we tell people we are blessed when in reality we are dying inside. We hid behind saccharine words, but behind those words we always kept our swords drawn.

The last battle, as it were, was the first time that we were ever honest with each other. The fictional contrition and forgiveness melted in the heat of our rage, and we finally faced each other honestly. Her words were telling. ‘I hate you. I always have. I find you disgusting and pathetic. I want you to go away forever.’ She hated me. But she had all along. Our friendship was dead after those words, to be sure, but I do not think it was any more dead than before those words. And as much as her words hurt, at least at long last she was honest, as she finally voiced the sour chord I heard all along beneath her approved Christian-ese words. Here is the irony of plastic righteousness: you only deceive yourself. It is far easier to hide from all the troubling questions that remind us that we are infinitely imperfect. ‘Why do I hate him?’ ‘What did he do that caused me to hate him?’ ‘What does he represent that I find hateful?’ I don’t know the answers. But I know she will never find them until she faces the questions.

I wonder if it is any different in our relationship with God. Whitewashed tombs, we were called. So concerned about keeping all the religious cultural rules, so concerned about proving our righteousness to everyone but Him. All legalism starts at home. It was not as if the Pharisees woke up each morning reveling in their corruption before donning their flowing robes. The first person they deceived was themselves, and their hypocrisy grew from there. A sepulcher is locked from the inside, which is why it stays locked. Better to be a disheveled hovel, full of filth but open to renovation. Better a pimple than leukemia: A pimple is uglier, but leukemia is far deadlier. So Christ came instead to the drunkards and the whores.

Passive-Aggressive sins, perhaps we could call them. Like a man who never finds the strength to face his spouse, expressing his rage in dirty dishes and unpaid bills. No less expressions of spite, yet ones easily denied if confronted. They are cowardly sins, ones that hide behind innocent acts and words. Instead of finding the honesty to openly hate someone, we instead turn to the plausibly deniable weapon of pity. Instead of having a thief‘s honor, we hide our robberies behind economic theory. Instead of acting on our lusts, we find a readily pliable mate and mold them to placate our insecurities.

At the heart of every sin is a deep distrust of God’s plan for our lives. We tell Him, ‘I don’t believe this place where You’ve put me is really the best place for me.’ So the single guy, frustrated with God’s seeming slowness in providing a spouse, decides to meet his needs on his own. Instead of trusting God with His singleness, he seeks out safer imitations of intimacy. I wonder if the authorized Christian-ese version is much better. Unwilling to face the consequences of open rebellion, he mouths ‘I’m sure God will provide,’ without believing the words at all. Sin leads to death - he just short circuits the process by killing his heart himself. Either way, he still doesn’t trust God. The woman in pain, deeply wounded and cast out, decides to take her identity into her own hands. Instead of trusting Him with her heart, she asks cocktails, men and fashion magazines to tell her who she is. The authorized version is subtler but no less deadly. Using words like blessed when she feels cursed, she hides in the idol of Christian success until she forgets the pain of being real. Unwilling to trust ourselves to the heart of God, we hide in our hearts in whitewashed tombs.

I’ve heard some Muslims say that a sin hidden is half forgiven. God is not so easily deceived. He will not partner with us in our excuses: He has paid far too dear a price for our forgiveness for that. A jealous lover, God demands all of our hearts. Our God is a consuming fire. Whatever will not be consumed must be destroyed. A sin hidden is twice damning. He is still faithful to complete the work that He started within us, but the surgical process will likely be far more painful for a passive-aggressive sin. It will likely take a much more extreme circumstance to bring that sin into the light, as we have seen far too often with Christians in leadership. I wonder how different New Life’s story would be had Pastor Ted confided to a friend his doubts about God’s provision in fidelity. I wonder if any of us would have had the humility to face such honesty, if any of us would have had the courage to recognize that our leaders are fallen just like us. That is where it has to begin: in the recognition of our fallenness. A whitewashed tomb can no more face the wretched contents of another sepulcher than it can face its own. But one hovel under renovation surely has a few home repair tips for another in the same position.

‘Be hot or cold, or I will spit you out of My mouth.’ If you’re going to be cold, be cold. If you’re going to sin, then sin. It is far better not to sin, but it is far worse to shelter sin in your heart and cover it with the appearance of righteousness. All sin is rooted in pride, so let us at least have the integrity to sin proudly. Let us find the courage to say, ‘God, I don’t trust you. I’m going to do things my way.’ Don’t whitewash it or water it down. Don’t find some way to justify it. Don’t pretend it’s okay. If you must sin, sin in the light.

Of course, if you find the courage to sin openly, you must find the courage to face the face the consequences honestly. For the open sinner, there can be no excuses or explanations, no blaming others, no chalking it up to circumstance. Only ‘I fought the law, and the law won.’ The wages of sin is death. For exactly that reason, Paul tells us to cast our the unrepentant sinner, that he may taste that death and turn from his wicked ways. Should we not do the same with the sinful parts of our hearts? Insurgencies rarely survive long in open combat. Sin openly, suffer the consequences openly, repent openly, and rejoice in His grace openly. In the wreckage of our independence, we rediscover our depravity and our dire need for redemption. Sin always ends in death. Breaking ourselves upon death, relearn to end our sin in the death of the One who broke death.

It all comes down to honesty. Be real with God. The Pharisees excelled at the appearance of righteousness. Their sins were well masked, hidden even from themselves. Certainly few of them had the bloody hands of a murderer, or the stench of adultery on their robes. Yet in their hearts they were adulterers and murderers. David certainly experienced more pain in the course of his choices. But the Pharisees were so filled with pride that they were no longer capable of pain. And hence no longer capable of love - leprous Ubermenschen, incapable of guilt, desire or redemption. King David was an adulterer and a murderer. Yet he was called a man after God’s own heart. Surely he experienced the consequences of his sins: one child dead and another gone rebel. Each time, though, he allowed those consequences to bring him back to the altar humbled. And each time, God restored him. A passive-aggressive couple must learn to fight, if they are ever to heal the relationship. They must trust that the other will not abandon them if they are at long last real with their feelings. God has promised that He will never leave us, nor forsake us. Perhaps we should learn how to fight with Him honestly.

In ‘The Problem of Pain,’ C.S. Lewis wrestles with the intellectual and philosophical complications of an all-holy, all-powerful, all-loving God creating a world of suffering and death. He brings all of his big guns to bear, his intellect, his research, even his experience of losing his mother. By the time the ink is dry, he has formulated a very effective and very clear framework for understanding God’s goodness in the midst of suffering. I am sure that book has helped many a Christian hold onto God in the midst of a great loss.

Several years later, Lewis authors another book on pain. In today’s publishing market, nothing would be less surprising than a sequel. Yet, this book is hardly a sequel. In the intervening time, Lewis falls in love with a woman dying of cancer. When she passes away, he is left alone with only God and his grief. In that place, he finds himself learning every lesson he once taught others. Ironically, the lessons are as foreign as they are familiar.

Imagine a professor of Aeronautical Engineering. He would be well placed and well equipped to derive design limitations and operating procedures for the aircraft. In fact, he writes the seminal textbook on aircraft design. Yet for all his expertise, a very junior pilot may understand flight better than he does. The young pilot may not know how or why, but she’ll have a sense of what feels right. She may not be able to describe the intricacies of airflow departing a surface, but she will know what an imminent stall feels like. Now imagine our professor wants to write a companion volume to his famously successful textbook. But instead of ’Introductory Aerodynamics, Volume II,‘ he elects to write about the experiences of flight. In order to do so, he will actually have to learn to fly. He will have to let go of his podium to take hold of the controls.

In all likelihood, the professor’s experience will involve great deal of frustration. It’s bad enough to apply incorrect crosswind controls. It’s far worse to know why they’re incorrect, and mess them up anyways. The inexperienced pilot has at least a fool’s comfort in ignorance: he can always decide that a maneuver he can’t master is ‘stupid.’ The professor does not have that option: he knows why it’s not stupid, and he still does it wrong. Ultimately, though, after the professor endures a good deal of frustration and learns a great deal of humility, he will be far richer for it. At the end of it all, he will be in a rare position: knowing enough to grasp the significance of his experiences, experiencing enough to understand the value of his knowledge.

And this is how ‘A Grief Observed’ reads. Lewis raises an objection, yet he knows the answer as soon as he says it. For the great professor, there is no comfort in ignorance: he has already explored every counter-argument. None of them hold weight. He has no choice but to face the thick reality before him. Yet, in doing so, that reality becomes a part of him. He ceases to be a complex of well-formed arguments, and instead becomes a man. He puts away the textbook and learns to fly.

I once told a friend that I cared about deeply that ‘you are stronger than you know, but you’ll never realize how strong you are until you turn to face your fears.’ In retrospect, perhaps the message was just as true for the sender as it was for the recipient. That friend was quite gifted and quite deeply wounded. As was I. We both built our walls high. Jesus says that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. It is so easy for rich man to find his security in all of the things he can control. But there are many kinds of riches. Some more dangerous than others.

Most of us are comfortable with the parable of the rich man. This is likely because few of us are rich by monetary terms. But I wonder, are we really so different from the rich man? My friend and I were not. Weakness’ best disguise is strength. So the rich man hides his poverty of spirit in an ocean of wealth. And the intelligent man hides his poverty in a sea of deep thoughts. The ambitious man hides his in a river of accomplishments. In this is the trap of the highly gifted: we all run from our fears, but the very gifted are able to run so fast that nobody else can keep up. A man who can run faster from his fears is not a stronger man. He is just more effective at being a coward. The highly gifted simply have deeper caves to hide in, caves so deep that no one can find their way in to pull them out. Where we are perfectly safe, untouchable and unsaveable.

It all comes back to pride. Self-sufficiency. We look to what we already have to tell us who we are. We create new household idols of intelligence, physical fitness, or any of a hundred things to give us identity. Even identity itself can be a damning richness. ‘I am rich in respect amongst my people, and I will place my trust in that respect and ask it for identity.’ It is a subtle trap, for there is a holy richness in relationships. It becomes a poverty when we use others as human shields against our deep fears.So the captain of the high school football team asks his letter jacket to tell him who he is, the son of the prominent political family hides behind his last name, and the occasionally faithful Mrs. Kahlo actually starts believing in the icon she becomes amongst her people. One watches all the films, reads all the books, and gets all the degrees that assure them a place of honor within their group. Another assures his respect and security within his group with silver wings, a combat tail on his cover and a coveted Weapons Instructor patch. Are the currencies of cultures any less treasures on earth? Are we any different from the rich man? Accumulated wealth or inherited wealth, both make equally good idols.

Richness is an equal opportunity trap. Even if we’re not better than everyone else at anything, we’re still relatively good at something. Economics calls this ‘comparative advantage.’ We are all rich in something. Even if we have nothing at all, we can be rich in nothing. We can have more nothing than anybody else, and we can remind everyone else of it at every opportunity. These ‘opposition richnesses’ ensure that richness is not confined to the successful. If you’ve got friends in low places, as the song goes, then you are rich in derision. If you are forever the outcast, then you are rich in persecution. If you are the hated group, then you are rich in discrimination. Ice castles or gilded palaces, we always use the materials at hand to build our walls. If others hurt us, we places their offenses as mines around our hearts, so that neither they nor anyone else like them ever dare approach. Is this really different from arguing circles around our enemies, or scheming ways to buy them out, or simply outright bullying them? Gold, success, failure, wealth, pain, all of these make equally good idols. Our household identity gods keep us from recognizing the Image of the one True God that burns inside of us.

Picture a scene between a married couple. In their bathroom, the wife brushes her hair before heading off to bed. She looks in the mirror and makes some disparaging comment about herself. The husband looks at her with a curiously stern expression, and he asks her, ‘why do you believe your eyes when they lie to you?’ His face softens, and he whispers to her, ‘Why don’t you see yourself through my eyes instead, beloved?’ There is a difficult choice for her in that moment. Believing her own eyes is safe, in a way. She knows what she is going to see, and she is more or less in control of it. But she will always see first the things that she hates about herself. Seeing herself through her husband’s eyes is scary. In order to do so, she must give up the safety and control of her self-defined identity. Yet only by looking through his eyes will she realize that she is more beautiful than she could had ever imagined. When he looks at her, he sees first the things that are delightful and lovely, and they blind him to all the things that she hates so much about herself. A woman failing according to her own impossible standards becomes a goddess by her husband‘s kinder standards, perfect from the moment of her creation. And she would see it herself, if she would allow him to give her his eyes.

I don’t imagine we are so different from the middle-aged housewife. God is trying to tell us how amazing we are in His eyes, but we continue to believe our own dimmed eyes. This is the great paradox: man is forever trying to be his own god, yet man is made in the image of the True God. If we would learn to trust Him with our identity, He will paint us with all the colors of His Divinity.

We talk so much about image. All of the shopping malls of our culture offer us images, each as well coordinated an Ikea bedroom set. Songs and shoes; studded belts, surfer shirts or semi-formal slacks, all of which almost equally expensive. But it is not just about consumerism. Our universities are shopping malls, as well. The engineering departments market an image to attract young students, along with the athletic programs, along with the rest of the various campus interest groups. But once you buy one piece, they’ll try to sell you the rest of the set. ‘You like studying cultures? Good, we’ve got some classes for you. And I’d like to invite you to the upcoming conference we are hosting. And while you’re at it, you should check out these films, these songs and these books. I’m sure you’ll like the atmosphere of open-mindedness we foster here, unlike some of the more reactionary types on campus. You‘re not friends with any of them, are you?’ And so on, inviting the acolyte to invest in an image. Everything around us invokes the power of image, be it organic foods in the supermarket, all the myriad flavors of bumper sticker, or our choices in real estate. It is hardly an exclusively American problem. Consider the posturing of tribal chieftains, or the almost universal idea of saving face. We weave and wear images, hiding our nakedness just as we have done since the exile from Eden. In doing so, we forget our first Image. We forget in Whose image we were created.

The man who has not filled his hands with rubbish has room in them to receive treasures. Those who are poor in all things save Him alone become truly rich. So it is the humble that He makes great. They do not try to remake themselves in the image of money, nor of smarts, nor of any other image, but that of God alone. But I am not humble. Nor are most of us. And until all of our other images are exhausted, we won’t seek Him. So I had to be made poor.

I was good at running. And I could run fast. I could quote chapter and verse, and if I didn’t know it, give me a week and I would learn it. I was image of intelligence, fused with the image of success. I am sure I was not the first to make that idol. But I made it well. And like a good idol, it would spit out answers and theories, never needing anything in return. I gave the world an image that they couldn’t see through. That they couldn’t hurt me through. I was safe. I was needless. I was unsaveable.

Until it all came crashing down. I ran into the one thing that I really wanted. My wish was Adam‘s wish. Someone like me. Someone in my image. I got exactly that. My image was a mix of the idols of intelligence and success. Hers was intelligence and identity. I set my image to work. I tried to find the perfect words. They failed. So I tried to read the right books. And that failed. I tried to figure her out. And failed. Every time I would try to logic the whole thing out, the whole thing would shift. We always ended up at each others’ throats. I had come across a problem I couldn’t solve for the life of me. At long last, a fight that my brain couldn’t win. How ironic that it was the fight I wanted to win most of all.

Grief. I wonder if there was another path. Looking back on my pride, I think probably not. How fitting that I met someone else just as prideful, wounded and fearful as me. I refused to face myself, so God found another way for me to do so. I would finally understand the magnitude my own brokenness only by seeing it in someone else. In my pride, my foolish choices ensured that I felt the full measure of that brokenness. Yet, in that moment of absolute defeat and absolute failure, my path home finally started.

If you had asked me a few years back what it meant to love someone who hated you, I could probably have quoted the Sermon on the Mount. Probably some Lewis, some Bonhoeffer, maybe a bit of Schaeffer. I knew the book answer. I just had no idea it would be so hard. If you asked me the same question today, I would respond only with her name. So the aeronautical engineer learns to fly. And becomes very frustrated in the process. But he learns nonetheless.

Lewis once wrote an essay called ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ He talks about how prophecy must humble itself before it is manifested. For all the lofty words of Isaiah, their fulfillment arrives in a smelly, stinky mass of baby in a manger. Perhaps this is the difference between knowing all the answers and actually living. Lewis’ books on Love were simple, universal, and perfect. The woman Joy Gresham was a messy, complex divorcee. Yet Lewis would have traded that book a million times over for one more week with her. The prophecies of Isaiah are thunderingly beautiful poetry, words as deep as the universe. Simeon holds the tiny Christ-child, an infant that looks little different from any other, for only a few moments. Yet the humbled fulfillment of the prophecy causes him to rejoice in a way the words never could. There is real life out there. The book version may prepare you, but you have to put the book down at some point and go outside.

It is not about a specific path. That’s the hard part of closing the book. Every time you read a Tolstoy novel, the characters all do the same things as they did last time. If you just learn how the story goes, you can anticipate it and prepare for it. But this is your story, and the Author writes original masterpieces each time. Yours’ is completely different than anyone else’s. I can’t tell you what to do or where to go. But go nonetheless. This is real life. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

There are some great differences between spoken language and written language. We speak with phonemes, almost all of which can be broken into consonants and vowels. Yet not ever language writes out their vowels, and some write out more vowels than are pronounced. Arabic is one of the former, where most soft vowels are implied and hard vowels are written.

One of my friends took a very intense Arabic immersion course. The first few weeks of the course dealt with script and sounds. Arabic, as a Semitic language, can included diacritics, or marks attached to consonants to indicate the associated soft vowels. These are rarely written outside of school and holy texts, but they are often a good learning aid for beginning speakers. A week or so into class, my friend's teacher took away the diacritics, and asked the students to sound out words. Surprisingly, the students were able to sound most of them out correctly. When the teacher asked the class how they could sound them out, they answered that 'it just sounded right.'

English generally spells out most of its vowels, and sometimes spells out a few that don't even make sounds, so it is a bit strange to a native English speaker to learn to read without vowels. Or is it? The modern dialect of Acronymese very readily makes words without using soft vowels. This dialect is spoken extensively in the military. Consider PNVS (pin-vis,) Pilot's Night Vision System. Two short 'I's, both implied. Or CIWS (see-whiz,) Close In-Weapons System. HATR (hatter,) Hazardous Air Traffic Report; WSO (Wizzo,) Weapons System Officer; DFAC (Dee-Fac,) Dining Facility.

Two interesting points come out of this similarity. First, the nature of acronyms in word creation. Interestingly, at some point the acronym supersedes its composing words encapsulating the meaning of the concept that it represents. Some acronyms are even designed with this in mind, like RED HORSE, (and of course some are designed completely oblivious to this fact, like CAC cards.) At that point, the composing words become something more along the lines of an etymology…an evolution of the word that can explain and amplify its meaning, but the acronym no longer points to the words, but the acronym takes on a life of its own. The life cycle of word generation and extinction is much faster, but so is the technical subject matter. ENIAC is as outmoded as a cooper, and both have long since exited common usage. This checks, as language, culture and economics are all intertwined. People use words to dialectically describe their world, and as their world changes so must their words.

The second implication is that there are natural pronunciation 'energy states,' certain things that are easier or harder to say. For some reason 's' is converted to 'sh,' 'w' becomes 'wh,' 's' becomes 'z.' 'rh' becomes 'r,' and others. The acronym is generally not made for pronunciation, so when pronounced, it becomes something easier to say. If I had more time, effort or interest, I would try to determine if this has something to do with soft vowels vs. hard vowels. Past a certain point, the word breaks apart into individual letters (DME, Dee-em-ee, Distance Measuring Equipment.) This may have some similarities with chemical formation and energy states. And if I had more effort or concern, I would see if there were differences between languages (as throat muscles develop differently based on what phonemes are used during childhood.) Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case may be, I'm fresh out of effort and concern on this topic. Out.

'Where did I go wrong?/ I lost a friend/ somewhere along in the bitterness/
And I would have stayed up/ with you all night/ had I known how to save a life.'
- 'How to Save a Life,' The Fray.

I remember sitting in an auditorium, about a decade ago, listening to a pilot talk through the timeline of an aircraft accident that claimed the life of one of his friends. A horrible detached feeling, listening to the cockpit voice recorder, the mishap pilot's voice calm. He smoothly rolls inverted and pulls toward the earth, like he had done a thousand times. Halfway through the maneuver, he realizes something is wrong. The altimeter is spinning down too fast, and there's still too many degrees to pull through. At that point, the aircraft is already lost, but for about half a second the pilot has a chance to eject and save himself. Instead, he elects to perform a high-G recovery maneuver, which comes up a few hundred feet short. The tapes abruptly stop. The thought of it still makes my blood run cold.

I thank God that accidents in aviation are relatively rare, and I pray that neither my friends nor myself will ever experience one. Unfortunately, when they do happen, they often follow the story of that mishap pilot. By the time you realize something is wrong, it is too late to do anything about it. Your best choices all lie behind you on the timeline, and you can't go back and get them. The last-ditch maneuver does little good, because the aircraft's fate is already decided. Your last choice is the hardest one: abandon the aircraft and save yourself, or stay with the aircraft and lose both yourself and the aircraft.

Perhaps relationships between people are not so different. You want it to work, you are determined to learn how to make it work, you do everything you can to make it work. But the arguments keep getting louder, the insults sharper, the sleights greater. And at some point you can't ignore the flashing red lights. You finally allow yourself to realize that the aircraft is going to crash. But by then it is too late. It no longer matters who made it crash, or how, or why. Perhaps a week ago, or a month ago, you could have saved it. Perhaps not even then, but either way those choices are all in the past. It's going down, and you have to decide between a parachute and a last-ditch maneuver.

Regrettably, in relationships too there are many retellings of the same tragic story. I am most familiar with my own. I'll fast forward the tapes to the mishap sequence. The red lights had been flashing for a while. My friends, my family, telling me the same thing. She doesn't care about you. She's not your friend. The airplane's going down. Get out. I kept putting electrical tape over the warning lights. 'You just don't understand her.' Any of a hundred other excuses for the ways she treated me. Two months ago, there had been a real chance to save the friendship. We had always had problems with reciprocity in our friendship. I would always be the one to call, to write, to initiate everything. She would respond erratically, one time with the affection of a good friend, another time with the distance of a stranger. But at long last, we had a breakthrough. We had the best conversation that we had ever had, one where we at long last let down our defenses. Really, it had always been a shaky proposition, our attempted friendship. Too many wounds bound only by duct tape and Christian-ese platitudes, it had never really been airworthy. But after that conversation, I actually allowed myself to hope. Maybe we could sort this thing out. Maybe we really could be friends.

I won't attempt to claim that I was flying right. I don't think I really even knew then what I wanted out of the interaction. My head said one thing, my heart said another, and I wouldn't allow the two to sort it out. Opposite ailerons and rudders, I already set the aircraft up to spin. And then we lost an engine. She had promised that she would call, that she would set aside the time to sort this whole thing out. That we would face each other honorably, and say all the things that we knew all along and never said. That we would do this the right way, bury the bitterness of the past, end the miscommunication and mixed messages, and finally figure out how to be friends. So a week of waiting on her call turned into a month, which turned into two. Which turned into a realization that came far too late. 'If she was just a male friend, I would never put up with this.'

It's called 'strength of an idea.' When a pilot has an assumption deeply ingrained in their psyche, they tend to wrap the data around that assumption. Which can easily blind said pilot to what the data really should be telling them. 'I know its an engine problem.' So you read the gauges accordingly and shut down a perfectly good engine while hydraulic fluid is spraying all over the cabin. You make a bad situation worse. 'She is trustworthy. If she said she would do something, she will keep her word.' It was not open for revision. It should have been. (I have no doubt the plank in my own eye has hurt others in the same way, forgetting some promise made in haste, choosing to avoid some difficult confrontation.) So the mishap pilot fails to realize that she just doesn't care, that she has no intention of actually facing him. So he foolishly elects to stay with the aircraft. He decides to write her, clumsily telling her all the things he should have said a long time ago. The response was predictable. The mishap pilot starts a rivet-popping 10-g pull as the aircraft tries to turn the corner. He comes up short, as all hope of future interaction ends in the ensuing fireball, both saying words to each other that can never be taken back.

The temptation is to focus on the last-ditch maneuver. Maybe if I had done this, or that, it would have turned out differently. Perhaps. But probably not. Past a certain point, the mishap has already happened. With my once-friend, it had happened a month before-hand. Her promised call was the only hope of really saving the friendship. When she chose not to keep that promise, she had already decided the ending of the story. At that point, there were no good options left. If I call her as a friend, pretending nothing is wrong, then I tell her that I am okay with being walked on. I had done so too many times. Doing so once more in such extreme circumstances would write the pattern in stone, forever preventing a real friendship. If I call her to confront her, the already tenuous interaction will surely shatter into a million tiny pieces. As it did. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. I'm not really sure why I believed that she would face me when things were hard, when she never faced me when things were easy. I'm not sure why I believed that a confrontation could solve what an invitation could not. The results were, I suppose, self-critiquing. There was, of course, a third option. Don't call. Recognize her choice not to keep her promise. Recognize the consequences of that choice. Recognize that she had already ended the friendship. The aircraft is going to crash. Don't be on board when it does. Had I the chance to do it again, I would have been reaching for the ejection handles.

Every pilot has a few close calls. The smart ones learn from them. The dumb ones get more close calls. Until they learn, they will continue to be a hazard to themselves and others. We all know people who end up in the same situation time and again, and it's always someone else's fault. A simple mathematical equation: if the same thing keeps happening with different people, they're the variable. You're the constant. There is a subtle form of the same mistake: the situational self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who can't quite stomach blaming the other outright generally end up blaming the situation. 'Every time I try to land in a crosswind, it turns out poorly. I shouldn't try to land in a crosswind.' Maybe that's because you're doing it wrong. Maybe, just maybe, a better answer is learning crosswind controls. 'Every time I get close to a girl, it always ends poorly. Maybe I have a vocation to singleness.' Perhaps instead he could put away his fear of commitment and intimacy, and it wouldn't always end poorly. 'I don't think that girls and guys can be friends after one has feelings for the other. When Harry Met Sally and all.' Perhaps the fact that the friendship doesn't work out has less to do with the attraction itself and more to do with her not being a friend in return. Her rule has been my exception, and I would not give up those friends for the world. I digress.

A relationship has two sets of controls. Both need to work in concert to keep it aloft. This is the tough part. There are times where one person will care more, be it pursuit, dispute or reconciliation. But you can't fly for them. At least not forever. If they are bound and determined to crash, whether through malice, ineptitude or apathy, at some point you have to let them do it. Intervene, confront, even intercede for a time, but you ultimately have to recognize their choice. Imagine the most extreme circumstance. A man cheats on his wife. He comes home each night unrepentant and unashamed. For all the world, she wants the marriage to work. She confronts him, she holds on, she does everything she can. He still comes home routinely reeking of another woman's perfume. At some point, she has to recognize his choice. He has chosen to wrong her. He made that choice knowing full well the consequences. She can no longer maintain both the relationship and her dignity. So she recognizes his right to be wrong, and gives him over to his adultery. He has wounded her horribly, yet ultimately she chooses to love him by recognizing his choice to do so, complete with consequences.

Pascal called it the Dignity of Causality. God loves us enough to allow our choices to matter. In a fallen world, this love comes with an unfortunate corollary: He loves us enough to allow us to experience the consequences of poor choices. Ultimately, this yields another corollary: He gives us the right to treat Him poorly, and the right to accordingly experience a loss of fellowship with Him. There is always grace, but if we do not choose to accept it, He still loves us enough to gift us with the consequences of our actions. We must learn to love others in the same way. We make excuses for the other, we try to nullify their actions by preventing the logical consequences of their choices. If I pretend like everything is okay, I can undo their choice to hurt me. It doesn't work, nor should it. Even if you hold the friendship together with fictions and chewing gum, you still cannot make them be a friend back. It is one thing to try to heal. It is another to enable. You need to respect their choice, and act accordingly. If they are not going to be a friend, then you are not friends. You lose a friend, as do they. But in reality, you already lost a friend when they made that choice. Allow them the dignity of causality. Give them the right to their choices, even if their choices are wrong.

There is one last step, whether or not we get out of the aircraft before impact. We need to let go of all shrapnel from the wreckage. There is a temptation to hold onto wounds as a final remembrance of the relationship. Even in this, we need to love them with dignity. If they chose to end the friendship, let them do it all the way. Give up the wounds to the Healer. Forgive them. This is the only good ending to the story. New stories cannot begin until the old ones are done, for if the past is always present, there can be no future. And who knows… perhaps the new story will be a redeemed version of the old one. Perhaps even with the same characters. Or perhaps not. Either way, the old must pass away to make room for the new.

So what's the right answer? What rule can we write? I'm not sure we can write any. The first line in any flight manual states, 'these procedures are not intended as a replacement for good judgment.' So we must turn to good judgment. And the best judgment comes from above. So we must first pray, yield our stories to Him and seek His will. And then we must do what makes sense. There is no point set in stone where you should automatically give up, no point where you must hold on come hell or high water. We must consider the level of commitment, the depth of the relationship and the nature of the dysfunction. But at least consider ejection. Above all, though, love the other person. Whether by fighting for the relationship or by recognizing their choice to end it. Love them whether or not you figure out how to save a life.

You know, ejection doesn't always turn out as poorly as one might think. Sometimes you might even get a chance to fly the same mission again. I ran into a friend about six months ago that I hadn't seen for years. This friend invited me to communicate, and I tried to. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who ignore others. People are busy, no doubt. But a one-sentence response shouldn't take four months. So never hearing back a good number of emails later, I felt ignored. The thought entered my mind to gently confront them. In the midst of accountability and counsel, I elected to eject instead. If they didn't feel obliged to communicate with me, then I didn't feel obliged to communicate with them. No vindictiveness, just certain expectations of friendship. So I let the thing run its course. I don't know if we'll ever really talk again. But if we do, there will be no bad blood from a last-ditch maneuver. I hear good judgment comes generally as a result of bad choices. Mine did. I pray you can save yourself the heartache and learn from mine.

The Fray's 'How to Save a Life' video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHg2q5M6WnY