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WasaiWarrior
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Name: David
Country: United States
State: New Jersey
Gender: Male
Interests: A little bit of everything.
Expertise: Not enough.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Medical
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
9/18/2002
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| [Note: originally posted on the R8 College Fellowship Blog.]
We grow accustomed to the smallness of things because we dwell in small places: a particular dorm room, a specific job, a well-defined family and a reasonably consistent group of friends. We develop habits and rituals that help to define the borders of such spaces and in that familiarity we find a deep and satisfying comfort.
But, as any one who struggles in life understands, such stability is an illusion. The domain of our control only stretches as far as the reach of our hands and it takes but the barest of intrusions to remind us that there is always something more powerful lurking about out there. A friend stabs you in the back. A boss rips into you for poor performance at work. A professor slaps you with a surprisingly awful grade. An accident tears you or someone you love to pieces.
A girl and I broke up once. That was devastating enough in itself, but what sent me spiraling into depression was the moment I knew she had begun dating someone else. Why? It was because that moment demolished any hope that I could do anything to restore the relationship to the way it was. A friend of mine died from leukemia. Despite having fallen out of touch for years, I was shocked and inexplicably bereaved by her unexpected death. Why? Death meant the definitive end to our friendship and the loss of any shared future experiences we might have had. Another friend committed suicide. My grades in medical school were slipping. Friendships I had once counted on suddenly seemed foreign and uncertain.
So whom could I blame but God? Who else was capable of bringing about such specific and timely personal disaster in my life? Was this the Sovereign Lord, the maker of heaven and earth? Was this how He chose to spend his time, the manner in which He wished to display authority? It all seemed too cruel and whimsical. The simple declarations by Christian friends that it was somehow "meant for good and God's glory" seemed trite. It let God off the hook too easily for such a gross violation of my desire and right to a normal, unperturbed life. Exactly who did God think He was that I should be given no say in the matters of my life?
Superficially, Calvinism excuses God to do as He pleases at the expense of our liberty and convenience. I fear a loss of control, but not because I challenge God's right to sovereignty. No, I challenge His right to Goodness. And that is why I am so easily content to be a Christian when all is well: because God's definitions of Goodness happen, at the time, to coincide with my own conceptions of it. I make no complaint of sovereignty when blessings and abundance flow my way. But when God's will comes into conflict with my own, my apparent indignation is more easily expressed in terms of God's right to act rather than His right to being Right.
So we throw Calvinism under the bus. I did, for a while. I thought I was refusing to believe that God was sovereign, but what I really refused to believe was that God was good. But over the course of a year, I slowly came to realize that, if God wasn't good, nothing was. I gave in more easily to my baser instincts. I saw my selfishness, wounded pride, and cynicism well up in my heart like bile, poisoning my sentiments and sensibilities with bitterness and a deep dissatisfaction. I found that it wasn't God who had taken control away from me; rather, I never really had control over myself to begin with. Denying God's control over this world didn't bring people back from the dead and it didn't stop the world from being a crappy place. All it did was take away any true or deeper meaning to the madness and pathology that I continued to observe around and within.
It began to dawn on me that I could not have it both ways. I could not take good without evil, God's companionship without his authority. The universe simply wasn't made to be that way. So I gave in.
Did things get better? Nah. But I could dare to believe that God was Good. In the end, Calvinism is really about hope: the belief that God knows what he's doing. It means that even evil itself is subject to his authority, that our groanings are the language of our yearnings for a place beyond, that such things are but shadows of a brighter land in which the object of our hope and affection, the author and perfector of our faith, waits with absolute certainty and power.
Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised— who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8 | | |
| I grew up with a mother who never took a gift... just half of an exchange. I remember watching, with horrified amusement, a lady try to give my mom a bag of mangoes. My mom chased her down and literally threw the bag into the open window of the car as it drove away. My dad is sometimes guilty of the same thing, fighting for the dinner check and the honor to be "gracious".
But is it really grace? Is the "politeness" of Chinese culture truly a reflection of divinity?
My high school years were dreadfully awkward. I rarely hung out with friends outside of school or church related activities which made college a bewildering world that clashed strongly with my sheltered and under-socialized life. I had a 9PM curfew most of my freshman year and spent weekends at home. I learned from friends that the spoon served with your spaghetti isn't for the sauce but is meant to hold the pasta in place as you wind it up with the fork. I learned that people from Malaysia don't eat bugs and swing from tree to tree. And I learned that I was terribly insecure. I bent over backwards to make people happy, taking extreme precautions to avoid offending others. I gave people gifts to show that I liked them, cleaned up messes that weren't mine, was overly-polite, and tried to overwhelm friends with signs of affection.
Then people started to treat me the same way. They started to give me stuff. I mean, they took me out to dinner and baked me cookies. They visited me when I was lonely and frustrated. They did kind things for me and other things to show me love. So I refused it all. I insisted on paying for dinner. I wouldn't take the cookies. I tried to compensate for their kindness with more kindness of my own. And I couldn't figure out why they seemed hurt or offended as a consequence. I couldn't figure out what was going on and why everything seemed so wrong, even though I was doing the "right" thing.
This was the time I began to understand grace.
I had grown up with the faulty impression that the correct way to honor a gift was through the exchange of one with equal or greater value. I thought that love was a two-way street, where affection grew out of mutual reciprocations over time. But what I learned is that this concept is a subtle but insidious expression of pride. It is oriented around the self. It makes an estimate of self-worth, matches that to the value of the gift, and then attempts to reconcile the difference with an equivalent exchange.
Love and grace are entirely different. Love is really the alignment of two one-way streets where people are compelled towards each other by an unknowable and unmitigable force. It doesn't earn its meaning by the value of what is sacrificed but by the satisfaction, happiness, and pleasure of its object. It gives gifts purely as an expression of selflessness with no anticipation of reciprocation and no calculations of social obligations. It gives simply to honor and pleasure the recipient.
And the reason I had such difficulty accepting this was because I didn't believe that I was worth it. I had deep issues of shame and self-doubt. I had this internal mismatch between the value I saw in myself and what others wanted to give me. I believed that I had to earn the affection and respect of others, that unless I had a right to what they offered, I had no right to receive anything from them. I couldn't come to terms with the attention and affection set before me that I craved but felt undeserving of.
But that is exactly what grace is: a cascade of undeserved blessing. I readily accepted the doctrine of sin and justice in my life. Growing up in a shame-based culture, it was easy for me to accept the teaching that I was less than worthless, that I was a vile sort of thing in the eyes of a holy God. But it made it nearly impossible to believe that the same God loved me with a furious and jealous and overwhelming desire to see me... happy. Satisfied. Pleased. Content. Brimming with joy.
What happened to me was very similar to what happened to Don Miller, as described in one of my favorite books, Blue Like Jazz:
"Things got worse with the girl. We would spend hours on the phone working through the math of our relationship, but nothing added up, which I received as only a sign of my incompetence, and this made me more sad than before.
Then she did it; she decided we didn't need to be in touch anymore. She broke it off. She sent me a letter saying that I didn't love myself and could not receive love from her. There was nothing she could do about it, and it was killing her. I wandered around the house for an hour just looking at the blank walls, making coffee or cleaning the bathroom, not sure when my body was going to explode in sobs and tears. I was scrubbing the toilet when the voices began. I'd listened to them so often before, but on this day they were shouting. They were telling me that I was as disgusting as the urine on the wall around the toilet.
And then the sentiment occurred. I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany like a movement in a symphony or something. The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself.
And I thought about that for a second and wondered why God would put that phrase so strongly in my mind. I thought about our neighbor Mark, who is tall and skinny and gay, and I wondered whether God was telling me I was gay, which was odd because I had never felt gay, but then it hit me that God was not telling me I was gay. He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself. It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God. And I wouldn't receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn't feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn't make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had pre-supposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. And I mean that. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right."
So things changed. I started accepting things from other people. In fact, it became an unspoken but beautiful habit to do that sort of stuff all the time: a whimsical treat to a meal here or there, a small gift or present for no particular reason at all. It became a true exchange of gifts and not merely a tabulation of collective debts. Instead of arguing and bickering over my self-worth, I actually thanked people and let myself be happy... because I knew that that's what they wanted all along.
I mean, that's all I want for you.
So when I offer to pay for your dinner or give you a bag of mangoes, I'm not trying to repay you for some debt I owe. I'm not asking for some future favor in kind. I just want you to enjoy the moment. I want to share with you an inkling of how much God loves you and longs to lavish you with mercy and blessing. Forgive me if I'm still awkward at doing it, if the timing seems weird and I send all the wrong messages and stutter and look embarrassed and try to make excuses for it. I'm a little rusty these days and am still as under-socialized as ever. So help me out. Take it. Enjoy it. Release the temptation to feel guilty, just this once, and simply let yourself be saturated with grace.
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| One class I had to take as a medical student was called “Sex Week” and consisted of three days of intensive exposure to human sexuality. While there were many, many things that we discussed and debated, one experience that stood out was a panel given by rape survivors. One of the panelists described her experience growing up as the victim of sexual abuse. She described how she was forced to have sex not only with her father, but with strangers brought into the home. She described how her mother never said a word about it and, when the issue was finally brought to the authorities, even implied that it was her fault for splitting the family apart. She talked about how her father was never convicted and even enjoyed a prominent place in his church until the end of his life. She spoke of how she bounced between various abusive relationships and how, after spending time with one Christian psychologist, she was seduced and abused by him as well. At the end of her sharing, she read this poem to us, which was written by Kee McFarlane on behalf of a different girl, 12-year-old Cindy. It serves as a disturbing and frustrating depiction of the failure of the system to defend and protect the very ones that have been victimized.
Promises, Promises—A Child’s View of Incest
I asked you for help and you told me you would if I told you the things my dad did o me. It was really hard for me to say all those things, but you told me to trust you—then you made me repeat them to 14 different strangers.
I asked you for privacy and you sent two policemen to my school in front of everyone, to “go downtown” for a talk in their black and white car—like I was the one being busted.
I asked for you to believe me, and you said that you did, then you connected me to a lie detector, and took me to court where lawyers put me on trial like I was a liar. I can’t help it I can’t remember times or dates or explain why I couldn’t tell my mom. Your questions got me confused—my confusion got you suspicious.
I asked you for help and you gave me a doctor with cold metal gadgets and cold hands… just like my father, who said it wouldn’t hurt, just like my father, who said not to cry. He said I look fine—good news for you. You said, bad news for my “case.”
I asked you for confidentiality and you let the newspaper get my story. What does it matter that they left out my name when they put in my father’s and our home address? Even my best friend’s mother won’t let her talk to me anymore.
I asked for protection and you gave me a social worker who patted my head and called me “Honey” (mostly because she could never remember my name). She sent me to live with strangers in another place, with a different school.
Do you know what it’s like to live where there’s a lock on the refrigerator, where you have to ask permission to use the shampoo, and where you can’t use the phone to call your friends? You get used to hearing, “Hi, I’m your new social worker, this is your new foster sister, dorm mother, group home.” You tiptoe around like a perpetual guest and don’t even get to see your own puppy grow up.
Do you know what it’s like to have more social workers than friends?
Do you know what it feels like to be the one that everyone blames for all the trouble? Even when they were speaking to me, all they talked about was lawyers, shrinks, fees and whether or not they’ll lose the mortgage. Do you know what it’s like when your sisters hate you, and your brother calls you a liar? It’s my word against my own father’s. I’m 12 years old and he’s the manager of a bank. You say you believe me—who cares, if nobody else does?
I asked you for help and you forced my mom to choose between us—she chose him, of course. She was scared and had a lot to lose. I had a lot to lose too—the difference was you never told me how much. I asked you to put an end to the abuse—you put an end to my whole family. You took away my nights of hell and gave me days of hell instead. You exchanged my private nightmare for a very public one.
My emotional response in the days following that session were mixed. In our discussion groups, we talked about the conflict between caring for the child and the abuser. I used to think that I could be rational and objective in treating members of the prison system competently, but at that moment I found it hard to imagine treating a child abuser without giving in to the urge to rip his testicles off in as painful a manner possible. My visceral reactions surprised me with the nature of their forceful and violent sentiments. I felt conflicted as my own Christian principles dictated that I should respond more kindly and with hope for change, but at the same time I felt that reacting gracefully to child and sexual abuse diminished the violence that had already been done and mocked the God who stood by and permitted it to take place.
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| Far too often, power - not fairness and certainly not generosity - is the name of the game. We assert ourselves and our own interests through raw physical strength, political connections, or loads of cash; through sexual prowess, sarcastic comments, lies and half-truths; through anything that can serve as a weapon in this low-grade war called life. We fight, and we often take spoils or go away defeated. Whether considering business, politics, family, or education, the big fish eat the little ones. Laws and regulations do limit excessive abuse; however, they only mark the space in which the war is waged. They don't eliminate the war.
-Miroslav Volf, "Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace"
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| I know I've been saying this over and over again throughout the years (ever since college, actually), but I'm finally going to buckle down and write a book. A few years ago, I even signed up for NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, whose goal is to help aspiring authors pump out a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I only got through 10,000 words of a strange little piece of fiction (which will never see the light of day... ever), but this year, I'm going for broke.
It's going to be a memoir about medical school, and I'm writing this because I'm looking for editors and peer reviewers: people I can bounce ideas and horrid drafts off of. I need people who aren't afraid to pepper me with criticism and snide remarks. If you're interested in the job, I'd really really appreciate it; just drop a comment, facebook message, e-mail, text, what-have-you and I'll add you to the list of recipients. And make you sign a non-disclosure agreement. In blood.
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