It’s a bit of a cliche, learning about God from parenting. God isn’t mad at us when it takes us time to learn, just as we’re not mad at babies when they fall down learning to walk. We don’t always understand why pain is necessary, just as babies don’t understand why we’re giving them shots.
It’s a cliche, but it’s what I find myself thinking about it a lot these days.
Read MoreIn the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man. “Who sinned,” his followers ask, “him or his parents? Why is he blind?”
“Neither,” Jesus said. “He’s blind so that you and everyone else could know that he could be healed.”
Read MoreI have many gifts. I am a good writer. I have a completely adequate choir voice. I am very good at comforting people. I’m a natural at milking goats. I can get bathrooms very clean.
I am not very good at forgiving. I forgive small slights easily and I anger slowly, but what my grandma calls “soul bruising,” the hurts my mom talks about passing through the heart—those take me a while.
My patriarchal blessing, the personal prophesy each member of my church receives, says something along the lines of, “Improve your capacity for forgiveness. It will make you more useful.” Every time I read it I grimace a little bit at this part. Oops, I think.
Sometimes I try and try and try to forgive and still come up wanting after years of effort. Sometimes, instead, I refuse to look at the pain. I sweep whatever calls for forgiveness under the rug so that I don’t have to go through the emotional labor of working it through. “Nothing to see here,” I insist, my back to the horse-sized lump in the rug. “Everything is A-OK.”
Read MoreIn the story of the Prodigals the younger son runs away with his inheritance and spends it all, only to come back to his father, humbled. His father throws a big party for him, which irks the responsible elder brother, because dad never threw him a party. “All these years I’ve been slaving for you,” he says, “and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15).
We’ve heard a lot about this story and what it means in Sunday school over the years: in the extended metaphor, we are both the brothers, and the father is God. We are the obvious and the secretive sinners, and God runs to welcome us back no matter what kind of sinner we are on any particular day. It is the secretive sinner, of course, that is more interesting to me.
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