8
It’s Always Something.
A couple of years ago I was speaking at a student conference held at a midwestern university. Each day there was a morning session and an evening session, the middle part of the day set as free time. One particular day there was a dodge ball tournament held on the tennis courts, one of many justifications for parents signing medical release forms before the church vans head out for the week.
I participated in one round of the tournament. As I waited my turn I stood near a chain-link fence. A young girl approached me and asked if I could give her advice on a particular relationship wrinkle she couldn’t iron out. I told her I’d never been a teenage girl, but I’d give it a shot. I could tell she really needed at least a little support.
She got about three minutes into her story and one of my teammates yelled out, “Doc, we’re up.” Pausing on her story so I could make good on my first commitment- injuring minors with a ball- I went out on the court. I ditched my flip-flops and opted to play barefoot. The late June sun had heated the court’s surface to an alarming degree. It wasn’t excruciating, but I had to keep my feet moving. The game commenced, I branded a few children in the name of the Lord, dodging their meager attempts at retaliation deftly. My feet were hot, but the sting had leveled off after four or five minutes. As I dodged a last ball chucked at me with generational prejudice, I felt my foot slide in the strangest way. I looked down, and it appeared the soles of my feet had come loose. They were still attached to my feet, but felt unnaturally squishy and misaligned. I threw one more ball wanly, which was caught, and hobbled off the court.
Pain. My feet started to swell. Then bloat. An achy heat radiated up to my ankles. I’d just cooked myself, and standing on the outsides edges of my feet was suddenly my only option. I knew instantly that this wasn’t a short term injury. The soles of my feet were freakish, gelatinous blisters.
I returned to the place at the fence, moving like a man three times my age, or a young one with rickets. I knew I was in the early part of a really crappy day.
The young girl picked up where she left off on her relationship woes. I listened the best I could, but standing and clear thought and interest in the contents of her diary had become extremely difficult.
Suddenly I heard a deep whir in my right ear, followed by instant fiery agony. A large wasp had stung my ear in response to my leaning up against the part of the fence in which his satanic family had apparently built their nest. I shrieked. Electricity radiated across my face, and I could feel my heart pounding in waves through the right side of my head. I grit my teeth to compose myself while the young girl asked, “are you ok?”
I nodded with a strained dignity. She kept talking.
My feet were now painfully overfilled bags of lighter fluid, my ear a throbbing, swollen bomb-site, and she just kept talking.
But I wasn’t listening.
I knew she was talking because I could see her mouth moving.
But I wasn’t listening.
I had stopped caring enough to even be disappointed in myself for not listening. I was trying to think of how I was going to get back to my dorm in my condition. She was pouring her heart out, probably, and I couldn’t have cared less. It was me I was concerned about.
The young girl, bless her heart, God love her, was suffering heartache and disappointment. She didn’t notice that perhaps the conversation needed tabled. All she could allow herself to know was her own desperation for relief. Just like I was doing.
Two people, suffering, unable to appreciate anything outside their fixation on their miseries.
It seems like most of us think we’re in something like agony all the time. A low-grade misery in the very least. So of course we can’t even listen to each other. We can’t put others’ interests ahead of our own. We’d like to. Love is great. But I got nuthin’. Something in us knows what beautiful lives look like, and we’d enjoy living that way.
Once this or that gets straightened out, then I can care about you.
Once these circumstances pass, I’ll have the resources to be a loving person, a forgiving, kind person even.
If I had extra money, more energy, I’d be there for you. Maybe later.
Right now I need affection, attention, affirmation. So unless you are here to have as much compassion for me as I am trying to aim at myself, please leave me alone.
We use each other, other people rendered products for our consumption, hoping God will someday change the circumstances we find ourselves in so we can be the great people we’d love to be. Generous when the lottery is won. Kind when people are easier to be kind to. The Snake sells apples to this part of us, the part that suspects the center of the universe is scarcity rather than boundless love. That there’s a great holding out on the throne. So we bastardize the ahava in us, inverting it so that the Love we were made to radiate we now chiefly demand and collect. From bright life giving suns to inescapable black holes.
So when our tradition shows us the Christ as a suffering servant, one who was acquainted with grief and misunderstanding, who knew physical, emotional, relational and familial pain, and yet also shows us one who loves; perhaps we don’t have to wait. Maybe I’m ready right now, with my bad knees and my depression and my out-of-whack budget to love others as much or more than I’d want them to love me.