Four years ago, I found out what happens when your perspective on the worst thing that can happen gets punted twenty yards past where you thought it was. The little town of Plumville was hit by a series of tragedies that probably would strain the suspension of disbelief of an avid Lifetime movie audience. First there was an Amish boy who died in a grain silo at my neighbor's farm. Farms are dangerous places, and accidents like this one happen, people were shocked and grieved. As you may know, the Amish are sort of famous for their faithful grace in situations like this, and so even in tragedy there was light. Then within a span of two weeks, an estranged husband fatally shot his father in law through the door of the house and was only prevented from inflicting further harm when his estranged wife disabled him with a .22 rifle. A young mother of two had a sudden and fatal heart attack. All of these things were shocking to the little town, they were life and death traumas, and people died, but none of them were the thing that set my current benchmark for tragedy.
That title goes to the other domestic violence of that weekend (you may ask what trumps a gun fight between an estranged couple that resulted in one fatality? Hold on to your butt). A man killed his two little girls ages 6 and 10, and his estranged wife, not with a gun, with his hands and a hunting knife. They were part of our church. I had been trying to help them work through their relationship issues for six months. I had those two little girls sit on the floor with me during Children's sermons and at VBS. I had spent hours trying to help their father and mother figure out how to live and love together. Obviously I failed, catastrophically.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't fail by being incompetent, or callous, or by ignoring the hard truth that was staring me in the face. I failed only because I didn't recognize how strong evil's grip really is. I was working with the proper assumption that most marital problems are communication based, and so we worked on learning to really hear each other. When we started, the woman was an utterly worn out victim. She had been living with a control freak. I can't go into details because I feel like I still need to honor her confidence, but I will give her this honor as well: she took control of her life, she stopped allowing him to control her, she moved out, she got a job and her own place, and even though he tried to change a little, she kept getting further and further away from him. When he finally realized that she was probably not coming back, his psyche broke. It looked like sadness on the outside, but it was really the manifestation of all his desire for control finally reaching critical mass.
I knew his greatest fear was losing them, his wife and children. There's a line in a song by Pearl Jam: "That which you fear the most, will meet you halfway." There was a demonic presence at work on that day, and I don't say that without acknowledging that there was mental illness, and long patterns of bad behavior, and abuse. But the thing that pushed it over the edge was a demon. A demon, in our mythos, is a twisted and fallen angel. The thing that led a man to strangle his little girl was a twisted and fallen version of love. It was love that existed in a place devoid of of grace, a place where control and domination was the only expression of love, where fear of loss was the motivating emotion.
I think this demon is running amok through our world. I consider it one of my most hard-learned lessons to have seen the demon tear off his facade and to have seen the bloody fangs and the sheer ugliness, so that I will never forget. So that I can learn to let go of my ego, and my illusions of control. We keep a picture of those two little girls on our basement refrigerator (the one we moved with us from Pennsylvania). Every time I look at it, I remember how bad it can get, and I am reminded that I am not in control. I am not strong enough to face the demon. I require the grace of God.
Awareness of God's presence in that bleak situation was the culmination of my nearly ten years in that town. If I did nothing else among them, I was there for that: the worst day, the darkest hour. I failed to rescue the marriage, I failed to protect those girls, I failed to reach their father, but God stood with me, and that I will remember as well.
I came into the ministry as a man with a lot of answers and certainty and arrogance. I thought I could lead the church through cleverness and skill and whatever other gifts I thought I had. That has turned out to be bullshit (pardon the language, but there is no other appropriate word). My job is to take up my cross and follow Christ, the same as it is for any Christian who really takes Jesus seriously. I will tell you one thing, I read Paul's letters a lot differently now than I did in seminary: 1 Corinthians 1: 25-31 (The Message Translation):
Human wisdom is so tinny and impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's "weakness." Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of the brightest and the best among you, not many influential, not many from high society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have - right thinking, and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start - comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please comment on what you read, but keep it clean and respectful, please.