JUST BECAUSE

My father-in-law was a quiet, unassuming man. Now my mother-in-law, well, let’s not go there. As I said, my father-in-law never spoke much; but when he did, he spoke quietly, quickly and to the point. He once told my wonderful wife when she was a little girl and making a nuisance of herself and everyone else in the car that if she did not clam down, he would stop the car and throw her off the bridge. She got the message.

A few years later when the siblings were teenagers and the electric bill came in, he lined them up, held the bill up and said, “We will never have a bill like this again. Turn out the lights when you leave the room!” They got the message.

My favorite was the time when My Beloved, teen-age driver at the time, came home, red hair on fire (Been there. Experienced that!) and told her Dad, “Some man wouldn’t turn off his high beams when I signaled him, so I turned on mine!” Wise Dad replied, “Arlena, just because someone else acts like a dummy doesn’t mean you have to.” A message we all need to remember.

Well, I don’t know about you, but there have been times in my life, not many but enough, when I have done something in reaction, actually in retaliation, to what someone had done to me. I did so knowingly and willingly and it made me feel good. It did not accomplish anything, of course. And in the end, it only made me look like what Arlena’s Dad said I would look like: a dummy.

Sometimes just the threat of punishment works to get the message across and the lesson learned and sometimes it does not and then we have to find ways to earn the money to pay the electric bill. Sometimes life’s lessons are indeed learned the hard way. But most assuredly and most embarrassingly they are learned the way of the foolish. In truth that is also the most painful way to learn a lesson.

Payback, as we have learned, does not work because it cannot undo what has already been done. My retaliating does not undo the pain I felt when that for which I am paying back was inflicted. I was hurt and then I hurt the one who hurt me. But that did not and does not take away my pain. It can even make it worse. He blinds me with his headlights. I blind him to get even and we both go blind. The foolishness of it all!

The temptation to hurt another just because the other has hurt us will always be there. Perhaps it is because of the “survival of the fittest” syndrome that is part of the human condition. Perhaps it is because we sometimes need to learn life’s lessons the hard way or else we will not learn them at all. And even if we really knew why we sometimes do unto others just because they have done unto us, that, in and of itself, would neither justify our retaliation nor make us look less foolish.

Hopefully we grow less foolish as we grow older. Our parents’ words of wisdom do sink in, after we have learned the hard way, and we then share our hard-earned and hard-learned wisdom with our own children. We hope they listen and learn.

FACING CHALLENGES

There are many problems in our world today. That is not to say that there ever was a time when the world was free from problems or had less of them than we have today. After all, give the instantaneous ability we have to communicate any problem, any issue, any triumph – anything! – to the rest of the world, the problems of this world almost seem both overwhelming and insurmountable.

Part of our problem today is that we can communicate so quickly. The headlines are rife with stories about politicians, pundits and ordinary people who have sent off thoughts, criticisms and even pictures without having taken the time to reflect upon what they were doing and now are paying the price for their indiscretions, their foolishness and even their criminal activity.

Concomitant with our ability today to communicate something instantly and worldwide is that a quick response is demanded. The one who sends the message wants a response right now simply because an instant response is available. Not too long ago one would send a letter by mail that took several days to reach its addressee. Then the one who received the letter had the opportunity to reflect on its contents and then write a reply. By the time the reply was received, several weeks could pass and no one was upset that it took so long to receive a response. Not so any longer.

None of this is to assert that we should do away with computers and email and cell phones. It is simply to say that sometimes the problems we face today are of our own making because we do not take time to reflect on the issue at hand that so often needs a reflective response which is impossible when an instant response is expected.

The point is not that we have so many problems both as a person and as a world, nor is it to bemoan the fact that we seem to be overwhelmed by them so many are they and so few resources there are at our disposal to deal with them. We know that we cannot solve all the problems in the world no matter how much money or how many resources we have. That is a given.

What we need to remind ourselves in the face of such that not everything that is faced can be changed; however, nothing can be changed until it is faced. In the face of any problem, especially a difficult one, often our first response is to turn and run, hoping either it will go away if we can get away or that someone else will deal with it while we are away.

The other response when made aware of a problem is to assert that “it’s not my problem.” But of course it is. Once we are made aware of a problem, once faced with it, it now becomes our problem as well. In this world we are all in it together whether we like it or not. It goes with the territory, as they say. Thus, each of us individually and all of us collectively are challenged to do whatever we can to resolve it. Often what we can do is very little, but at least we can do something. The problem may not be resolved no matter what we do. But doing nothing only makes the problem worse.

TRIAL BY JURY

We’ve all been told that someday, that being upon our death, we will have to stand before the judgment seat of God and face our Maker. We have been told that all the sins we committed in this life will be laid out before us and we will have to make some kind of defense for them. None will be forthcoming, of course, as sin has no defense. It is always a deliberate act that we know at the time of its commission is wrong but we still go ahead and do it anyway knowing all the while we have no excuse.

At the same time we will want to lay out before God all the good we have done hoping that those good works will somehow make up for all our bad deeds. They won’t. They never do. But that, too, is no excuse for not doing the very best we can whenever we can, which is all the time.

Whether or not this scene really plays out upon our death only time and death will tell. It does not matter anyway because eternity is out of our hands. What God has in store for us when that time comes is left to our imaginations. If we want to believe it will be a time for judgment or a time for forgiveness or whatever crosses our mind, it will be, as Paul says in one of his letters, beyond our wildest imaginations. This does bode well.

What is important and what I think really concerns God and what should be our own main concern is not what will happen in the hereafter but we are doing and what is happening in the here-and-now. We know that to be true and, for the most part, we are quite aware of such and act on such awareness, but not always and perhaps not often enough, or not often enough to make a difference in the way we live.

George Bernard Shaw, who enjoyed the fruits of a successful life and who understood that to whom much is given, much is demanded in return and who did not observe this to be happening opined: “Every person who owes his life to civilized society, and who has since childhood enjoyed its very costly protections and advantages, should appear at reasonable intervals before a properly constituted jury to justify his existence.”

It might be less intimidating to appear before a jury of our peers than before our God, but not by much, if at all. Public confessions, which such would be, are humbling and frightening. They are humbling because we have to stand naked, as it were, before our peers and admit that we have failed to live up to our responsibilities as citizens and, even more importantly, as Christians, and deliberately so in the process.

On the other hand, such confessions are frightening not because we are afraid of the punishment that would be meted out because there would be none. Rather, what frightens us is that in facing our deliberate failures we would have to change the way we act so that we do not repeat them between now and the time we appear before that jury again.

The truth is that we are both the judge and the jury of our own actions. We know what is expected of us. We know that we have failed. We know what has to be done. All we have to do now is do it.

THE POT CALLING THE KETTLE “BLACK”

We’ve all made that remark. We’ve listened to someone criticize the actions of another and thought to ourselves that the criticizer was just as guilty of the same fault as s/he found in someone else. It is quite easy for any one of us to be blind to our own faults, failings and shortcomings while being very aware of those of others, and sometimes being very verbal about it in the process.

That is not to say that just because each and every one of us comes up short when it comes to being the perfect person, one found without fault, just because there is no such person, none of that means that it is all right to ignore another’s faults and failures just as it is not all right for others to note ours. The fact that we are all imperfect does not give us license to be such.

If, as children, our parents did not point out our bad actions and simply let us be, we would assume that what we were doing was just fine and dandy. On the other hand, if they did point them out and we ignored them and then were punished for our continued bad behavior, then we were taught a lesson. We could have listened and learned or we could have not listened and learned the hard way. The choice was ours.

The saving grace in all this, if it indeed can be called grace, is that we are all in the same boat. We learn some lessons because we are willing to believe our teachers know what they are talking about and want to save us from certain pain and sufferings. We also, at times, need to suffer that pain in order to really learn the lesson our teachers were trying to get across but which we were too stubborn to believe and learn.

One of the great spiritual classics that I used to read in seminary was Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. It was/is (you can still buy it on Amazon) filled with pithy and pointed sayings and observations about how to live a Christ-like life. As a young seminarian that is certainly something I wanted to do, that being the reason why I read it almost on a daily basis.

Whether my devotional reading made a difference in my life only others can tell because, again, each one of us is a rather poor judge of our own character. We often downplay both our good qualities and our bad. What I do know is that it was always a struggle to be the person I thought I wanted to be even as it was rather easy for me to judge that another was not acting as I thought he should.

When I made those judgments, I should have remembered what Thomas had written: “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” I could not back then and I still cannot today. It is no consolation that, again, there are many in the same boat as I. Thomas would probably say that we’re all in that same boat.

If there is any consolation, it is that we are still in the boat rowing, trying to become what we wish to be and that our boat mates are doing the same.

DOING GOOD

John Wesley, good Anglican that he was till his death, who, along with his brother Charles were the founders of Methodism, was at his heart and in his ministry an itinerant evangelistic preacher at a time in England – and in the world – when that was just what was needed. The Wesleys preached and taught a way of life that was based on a regular practice of prayer and good works. There was a method to this way of life, a regularity and orderliness about it, from which came its name.

Their preaching did not fall on deaf ears because that was the message that needed to be preached, taught, learned and put into practice. They were highly successful. Their message is no less needed today than it was over two centuries ago, perhaps even more so. The people of the Wesley’s time led very simple lives, hard lives but very simple lives. Our lives today are much easier, given all the gadgets we have available to us to make life such. But our lives are also much more complicated also because of all these gadgets, many of which are simply toys.

Because we have so much to distract us, so many more options about what to do, how to use our time, what next, our lives have become somewhat, if not entirely, disordered. Sometimes it seems as if we do not know if we are coming or going. In those times we long for a simpler life even if we have no idea what that would mean or even knowing that it would mean giving up and even giving away some of these gadgets that consume so much of our lives.

For John Wesley the simple life boiled down to simply doing good. He said that we should do all the good we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as we can. Tall order? Yes. Exhausting? No doubt. Fulfilling? Absolutely. And it is all very simple, really, even if it sounds or seems all-consuming.

Opportunities for doing good are everywhere, especially right where we are. Be a good parent, a good child, a good spouse, a good worker, a good boss, a good whatever we are wherever we are. Do the best we can do at whatever we are doing. It is when we do less  than the best or, worse, when we deliberately do that which is not good, that we make problems for ourselves, for those around us, for the world.

While the opportunities are there, we often do not see them because, again, we have allowed ourselves to be consumed by consumerism. We fill our lives with so many distractions that we can’t see what needs to be seen, can’t hear what needs to be heard and then can’t do the good that needs to be done. It’s not that we do all this deliberately so much as it has come upon us gradually, one distraction at a time, one after another.

That’s where Wesley’s way comes in. We need to step back every once in a while – he would say every day – and take a good look at our lives, to slow down, sort out priorities, shed unwanted and unneeded distractions and allow ourselves time to look for the good in each moment. That would make life simpler, more orderly and more enjoyable.