In my new home of Ambridge, the cheapest, healthiest way to pass the time is walking around town; it's the flattest bit of western Pennsylvania I've come across, and it's packed with abandoned shops and wide sidewalks, ensuring solitude if not a wide berth between me and other streetwalkers. Tonight, as I passed a bar blasting some banal New Found Glory-style pop punk, I overheard a man half-shouting into his phone-- some argument over what he told somebody to do and when he told them. I didn't think much of it; it was obviously a drunken squabble with a girlfriend or a business partner.
Then he belted out something I didn't expect at all. Slurring and lurching through his words, I recoiled as I heard, "Can you let me talking for one f***ing second-- after thirteen years of marriage, it's my f***in' turn to talk!"
Thirteen years? It was dark, and I didn't want to gawk, but out of the corner of my eye, this guy looked and sounded just a few years older than me. Thirteen years... you don't just get that far by accident. My own marriage lasted less than three. Yet, however he had held on for so long, what I heard in that snippet of the fight worried me, because it was the same attitude that got me signing divorce papers, though I never imagined I'd face that situation.
To make a long story short, my [marriage ended because of hurt, resentment, distrust, and retribution].
It was tit for tat. As the Christian author Walter Wangerin writes in The Book of Sorrows, "he who is cut cuts back." We're born with that selfish need to balance the equation, restore karma, ensure fairness, and the like. You wronged me, so I can wrong you. Or, in the case of the man on the street, you get to have your say, so now I get to have my say. We imagine ourselves entitled to our own idea of justice.
Yet the world, so very often, doesn't reflect that at all. A tree with optimal sunlight grows taller than its neighbor and blocks the sun, ensuring its own supremacy. A man given five talents who earns five more gets to take the single talent of a man who fearfully failed to invest his. Mozart gains immortality and Salieri disappears into the dustbin of history. We rage in vain to balance out nature, our jobs, our relationships-- anything we feel is stacked against us, when the end we're seeking is an inversion-- perhaps even a perversion-- of our natural state.
Contrast that with the ways of God. What the Bible describes is nothing less than His deliberate campaign to unbalance everything. Adam and Eve set up the system rather tidily; "you sin, you die." Yet, noting that we are minuscule, temporal creatures that God does not need, He changed that system to "you sin, I die, you live." He is a king who washed peasants' feet, a god who shared his bed with the mouths of farm animals. He humbled himself and broke the natural order to deliver to us a benefit we never deserved. People ask me how it's fair that some who never hear about Jesus might be judged the same as those who have; they've got it all wrong. The unfairness is that anyone is forgiven. We're so used to getting ours, making sure the scales tip in our favor, we lose sight of the fact that they absolutely should not turn in our favor when it comes to reconciliation with God.
I'm praying that what I heard tonight isn't the worst that I feared-- that the man will sober up, apologize, and not bottle up bitterness until it explodes in infidelity, abuse, or neglect. And though I've forgiven my wife (I messed up the scant chance I had to restore the marriage), this is a lesson I must still learn to live out. In my friendships, at my work, in any future relationships, I mustn't keep a record of wrongs against me, as it says in the famous 1st Corinthians passage. I mustn't keep that mental flow chart of what I deserve after enduring x, y, or z; I must follow the example of the One who made me and endured greater indignity and injustice than I'll ever know.
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:5-8
ed. note - this post has been edited to remove potentially harmful or offensive details. In all cases, every intent has been made to preserve the authorial intent of the post.
0 comments:
Post a Comment