Musings Part 5

Second Chance

It's human nature to think more of ourselves than is sometimes warranted, particularly in our performance-driven image-oriented culture. We like to consider ourselves fast learners, loving, intelligent, accepting, and on top of life. It's a real struggle to admit that something eludes us in our learning and growth, especially if we had been thinking we already had it 'in the bag.'

Several weeks ago I had one of those benevolent near-epiphanies of self discovery in which I was eased into a great self-awareness; one in which I learned I have a real problem with a critical spirit that quickly slices and dices anyone failing to pass first muster. I learned I'm often anything but loving and accepting. It was a hard bit of learning but I thought I had it nailed at last. Wrong! My contentment and smugness were short-lived.

Last week my very cherished and gentle friend Janice came a great distance to South Carolina for opening night of a musical comedy I helped produce. Janice is a great champion of my writings and my efforts at creating theatrical illusion and fantasy. Happily, I provided her hospitality in my wannabe B & B for the weekend. In spite of her being run off the road by a rather aggressive and mean-spirited driver of an eighteen-wheeler and getting quite disoriented in unfamiliar terrain, she had a splendid time here and pronounced the highway terrors a small price to pay.

During the past week I had noticed a wrist watch in the kitchen on the back of the sink. Assuming Janice had left it here during the weekend, I figured to return it to her by mail. I was cleaning up a week's worth of neglect in the kitchen this morning and happened to look more closely at this timepiece while moving it to my catch-all table in the den. I realized I would probably have to return it to her by armored car. I was astounded when closer examination revealed it to be a woman's diamond-studded Rolex time piece.

Was I happy that she had an opulent possession like this? Was I happy that someone unknown to me had gifted her with this? No! In my own secret way I was far meaner that the truck driver that ran her off the road on a ominous foggy night. To the driver Janice was an anonymous stranger in the night, in the way of his quest for faster profits. To me, Janice has been a well-known joyous source of happiness and encouragement. Yet, in my well-rehearsed self-righteous way I drew all manner of conclusions about Janice's integrity, her recklessness with money, her willingness to sacrifice her welfare on the high altar of consumerism. I wondered about her duplicity in agreeing with my pronouncements about the need for all of us to consume less while wearing a $20,000 portable clock. How could someone really want to encourage little kids about simpler living while teaching them piano and yet be caught wearing this ostentatious symbol of reckless consumption?

It is indeed fortunate for unnamed defendants that I have never been called to serve on a jury and that I never picked a career in investigative journalism. In my critical modus operandi I never bothered to get all the evidence before passing judgement and nearly imposing sentence on Janice. I learned again today in another brilliant flash of scrutiny that I have really learned almost nothing about reserving judgement until all the facts are in. I have learned less than nothing about the fact that judgment isn't for me to make, even with all the facts. Only God has the wisdom and mercy to pull that off.

There have been those times when I would have given anything to be able to touch fingers with another's thoughts, to have performed a Vulcan mind-meld. Then there are those times, like this one, when I am grateful beyond measure that the dark rancid thoughts of our foul spirits can be safely locked beyond the reach of our unwitting victims. Happily, Janice was spared even knowing the offensive thoughts that I allowed to become embedded in my life for a day. She certainly deserves far better than those she got from me yesterday in my dark musings. She certainly deserves better friends.

Today I called Janice. I casually mentioned I had found an opulently expensive Rolex in my house and wondered if it could possibly be hers since she had not inquired about it. I, of course, would expect someone who has lost a $20,000 pearl of great price to be frantically seeking it out. So would Janice, it turns out. She broke out in gales of hysterics. Her $20,000 Rolex museum piece turns out to be a $40 'knock-off' her son had picked up for her in New York. I had been completely duped and I thought I knew the real thing when it came to fine arts and the like. Wrong again. Happily, we shared much amusement and laughter over this and she told me of the truly hilarious acts of theater she has been able to pull off with this $40 imposter. I asked her to have her son round me up a Rolex of my own, for $40. After all I do theater as a hobby.

But, there was no laughter when I got off the phone with this dear friend. I had the horrific realization that I had condemned her in my thoughts, had sentenced her, and was ready to impose my self-righteous penalty. What was absolutely convincing to me as a 'case' against her proved to be, in fact, without merit or fact. What is merely a bit of costuming for some happy theater in her life was for me a basis for a groundless indictment.

In the past I have often been left in wonderment at how rapidly people have disappeared from my life. Did something I have or something I said lead them to a groundless indictment of me? Did they treat me exactly the same way that I nearly treated Janice. More importantly, did some of these people make a correct read on my true nature and simply spare themselves the heartbreak of false condemnation? Smart people if they did.

I was duped by a $40 imposter. Worse yet, I have been duped by a condemning attitude that could have cost me something far more valuable that the grandest museum piece in the world. I only hope that Janice is what she seems, far more charitable than I and a whole lot more accepting of people, warts and all.

Peter was making inquiry of Jesus one day and asked him just how many times we should forgive people. Matthew's gospel records this snippet of dialog between them. "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus told him "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven."

For my sake, I hope my patient gentle friend has read this part of the book and isn't counting.


Puzzles

This morning while dressing for work, I was digging through a dresser drawer in desperate search for a safety pin. I never found one but I did come across something probably more important in the long run; a fine post card from the French Alps that had been cut up into a twenty-piece jigsaw puzzle. I had not looked at this card in years as the assorted parts were scattered in the bottom of one of those drawers containing what mathematicians would call a 'strange attractor.' There were a lot of weird archeological curiosities from my past mixed in with those puzzle pieces. I had long forgotten who the card was from but had saved the fragments for inexplicable reasons of sentimentality that were once logical.

Today on impulse I took the two minutes required to reassemble the pieces to see who the message had been from. It turns out that some fifteen years ago a missionary friend had sent me a splendid hand-written missive of encouragement on the back side of an action photo of an Olympic alpine skier. It made a nice memento and contained more than a bit of this young woman's soul. It certainly did merit being archived in my drawer during this past decade and a half. However, there was a small problem with the card today. The twenty-piece card was now made up of only nineteen pieces. One of the corner pieces had slipped off into a cosmic discontinuity and is now lost to me. The message was all there but the card is incomplete. All I could see was that which was not there.

This got me to thinking about how people so easily focus on deficiencies and imperfections. One time last summer I was riding on a train through Georgia and saw a Baptist Chu ch. I well remember this chu ch but have no memory of the other churches I must have seen that sultry day on my three-hundred mile journey. That small lack had made an unforgettable impression in my memory.

I was in Florida five years ago and one day while wearing one of my very favorite shirts, a red ink pen leaked in the pocket. I was aghast. All I could see of that shirt was a vast vermilion ocean of unwanted indelible ink. Making a typical dress shirt requires some two yards of material or approximately 2,600 square inches. That crimson ink spot covered approximately a half inch circle, or less than 1/15000th of the total area of cloth on my shirt, yet I saw nothing of the remaining 14999/15000ths of my shirt. My first impulse was to view the shirt as ruined and a total loss. Certainly, if I had $150 invested and lost but one cent I would not feel financially ruined. The proportions are exactly the same. Why the puzzling difference in response?

Have you ever bought a new car and for months parked it at the far edge of vast parking lots so as to avoid getting a 1 mm by 4 mm nick from some self-absorbed, thoughtless, inconsiderate, clumsy fool driver lacking in basic appreciation of the unspoiled beauty of your fifteen-coat lacquer job? You finally tired of the long summer trek across the incendiary asphalt and started parking closer. You came back out to your car one blistering August day and finally found that vast 1 mm by 4 mm nick installed on the driver's door and you were suddenly oblivious to the remaining perfection of the other 99.99999999% of the painted surface. Your world melted down. Why?

At one time I lived in an elegant condominium with perfect white carpets. Being the hospitable type, I gave a Christmas party one year to which an uninvited drunk stranger showed up. He promptly spilled a large glass of burgundy wine in the center of the living room carpet. Do you think I saw anything else the rest of that night besides that maroon insult on my sensibilities? It didn't help at all that this sotted party breaker laughed following his mis-adventure.

The Old and New Testaments are just that, testaments to the fact that humanity has gotten itself into a whole lot of trouble during the past several millennia. The world's newspapers chronicle the fact that this is only getting worse. Uncounted hundreds of millions of people have been put to death in this century alone merely because they were judged as missing something, being of the wrong color, having different beliefs, being damaged goods. As I write, millions in Algeria live in abject fear of the hideous genocide going on in that country to kill those that are different or lacking in some proscribed trait. Neo-Nazis in Germany kill people in wheelchairs. Whites kill blacks because they are blacks.

It seems to be the nature of people to find flaws in things and each other. I can do this with the best of them. I once lost interest in a woman because her hair was thinning in front. It didn't matter that she was probably one of the most ethical and moral people I had ever met. Fortunately, she is now happily married to someone more accepting than I was. A woman colleague of mine recently met a man through a dating service and told me she found him "really quite nice" but unacceptable because he had too much space between his teeth!

In our fallen state we throw away shirts with a small spot in a large expanse of unstained cloth. We insult the integrity of a stranger's mother when we find an unintended tiny nick on the door of a new car. We throw away a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle of a magnificent alpine vista because a single corner was lost. In our consumer culture we throw away an entire TV in a fine cabinet rather than finding and replacing the failed ten-cent diode in its power supply. A neighbor discards her microwave oven because she doesn't want to clean it. We abandon a spouse of many years because of one misdeed.

There is a Kingdom where no deficiencies are to be found, no corners missing, no nicks in the transparent gold. The New Testament assures us there will be no problem with orthodontic alignment or thinning hair in that place. In that Kingdom we can expect perfection. Yet, the only way to get there is to acknowledge and accept the imperfections and deficiencies that exist in this realm and in each other, here and now.

It is a good thing that Someone was able to see beyond the missing corners, crimson spots, and nicks in our hearts and souls, beyond to that in each of us which was made in His image. He came down and was nicked by man. He made a vast crimson stain with His own blood on the earth that we might find the true acceptance for which we long. Perhaps we might learn from his example.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.


Provision

Heat of day continuing for a season,
late afternoon promises cool of evening.

Summer's solar fury begins to abate,
shadows extending across incandescent asphalt.

Ascending the serpentine mountain road,
the unseen summit promises breezy refreshment.

Tangled briars give us pause,
photosynthetic magic is afoot.

Reaching in, cautiously, ever so slowly,
pendant clusters of stellar fusion abound.

Taking my cap off to Heaven's bounty,
it become a generous horn of plenty.

With grateful hearts we commune,
giving thanks for fruit of the vine.


Like a blackberry?


Final Flight

Settling in cramped confines, no leg room,
long turbulent flight into night looms.

Turbines powering up for take-off roll,
unseen force weighs heavy on your soul.

Pitching forward into brooding ebony sky,
with apprehension, you ruminate. Why?

Future, forever transposed in elapsed memory;
time's a cruelly inverted present paradox.

Hourglass sands have nearly fallen,
life's fantasies freeze, fracturing.


He shall raise up His own in the twinkling of an eye.


Scales

In a world where forty million die annually from starvation, tens of millions of Americans will spend a billion dollars this month losing the pounds they gained back last month. This in a country where it has been estimated that half of all food is wasted, spoiled, and discarded and where a quarter of women have severe eating disorders such as anorexia and or bulimia. Many of my friends give testimony to having lost hundreds of pounds over decades of tortured dieting and having spent tens of thousands of dollars to pay for their torments. They describe the complete ruptures to their social lives as a result of obesity.

Once a week many of these agonized souls go to their local Healthy Weigh, Inches-A-Weigh, or Physicians Weight Loss Center for a heavy reckoning: weigh in. With trepidation, they ascend onto the scales to learn if they have fallen off the wagon once more and been duped again by the view that just one little bite won't make any difference. For these defeated beings, toxic shame erodes self-esteem and confidence. Excess so often produces the same barrenness of soul that scarcity yields. The numbers on the scale simply state the facts, not mincing anything.

Scales can give us 'bad news' but they can save our lives. We can take to heart the high numbers as a stern warning that we need to do something to keep the priceless treasure of good health from slipping away. Or we can ignore them and obtain our just desserts. For a large group of heart patients, scales can mean the immediate difference between cheap medicines and astronomically expensive hospitalization or life and death.

Patients in congestive heart failure have the great challenge of keeping their bodies from accumulating too much water. Heart failure disrupts the ability of the kidneys to regulate water retention and victims of this sinister condition sometimes end up retaining huge amounts of water, which makes the heart failure even worse. Most ominous for these hapless patients is the tendency of fluid to collect in the lungs when this condition gets out of control, causing the sufferer to nearly suffocate and drown.

If heart failure patients weigh themselves every morning before eating, they are then able to determine if their bodies are retaining too much water. If the scales indicate this to be occurring, these dear people can become proactive, adjusting their medications and avoiding an acute crisis that could put them into the hospital intensive care unit or worse yet, into that small cold marble room by the back door of the hospital.

Sadly, many victims of congestive heart failure are elderly, quite frail, and often possessed of rather poor vision. They may have scales but lack the ability to safely get onto the scales without falling. They may be able to get onto a set of scales only to find the numbers unreadable, rendering useless their important warnings. It is a tragic reality that many of these patients are aged, living alone, and without anyone to help them get on the scales or to read the numbers. Every year we have hundreds of these people admitted to our hospital for acute heart failure that could have been avoided, if there had been someone to assist them, to heed the warnings in time.

It occurred to me that we are living in an era of desolate prosperity where people have been able to buy privacy and isolation which has resulted in their becoming prisoners and victims to the loss of community inter-dependence. People live alone, not needing each other during the good times. In the bad times, no one is there. The scales go unread. The results are often catastrophic.

In matters of the soul, ignoring the warnings can be horrendous. As with heart patients, there is a period of time when a proactive response is essential. Jesus told us that the light would be on us for but a short time and then darkness would overcome us if we did not move with the light. In the darkness we cannot heed the admonition of the scales.

In the spiritual realm there is a process nearly identical to heart failure that is going on in all of us: sin. It's in our nature to sin and to do this a lot. Scriptures tell us that man is depraved in his soul. The wire service, daily news, and any two-year old child will confirm this to be so. We retain the vileness of sin in our souls. In these times of material prosperity we often delude ourselves into thinking we don't need God. Often heart patients will quit taking their medicines because they feel good. In an acute crisis they find out the error of their ways. So it is with people and God during the good times. They so often stop taking Him seriously. Unexpected death may pre-empt opportunities for obtaining cleansing of their souls. The consequences could last for all eternity.

The Law of God was given before the foundations of time as a measure, as a set of scales, as a basis to judge our merits. The true precarious state of our condition is revealed. The Apostle Paul, acting on high authority, pointed out that every last one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. He got on a roll, and at the risk of causing offense, told us that the wages of sin is death. It would seem that in the eternal scheme of things, we all have earned nothing more than a place in the cold marble room.

But it turns out the Great Physician had another idea. He sent His Advocate to help us find healing for the perilous condition in our souls, if we do it now. Jesus came to read the scales and to tell us what we need to do to avoid an acute crisis in our souls; how to go on to experience ultimate health; to be admitted to Heaven rather the Hospital.

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."