A few weeks ago, my friend Lee told a story I haven’t quite stopped giggling about. She was up in the wee small hours of the morning with her baby. She fed him, changed him, swaddled him, and placed him back in his crib – all the while feeling as though something was a little bit off. As though she was a little bit off. Everything seemed kind of fuzzy, but that’s to be expected when you’re completely exhausted by the demands of a newborn. Only when Lee caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror did she figure out what the problem was.
"[She]was wearing her sunglasses. In [her] pajamas. In the middle of the night. While feeding and diapering [her] baby."
Like I said, I haven’t quite stopped giggling ever since I first imagined the sight in my mind’s eye.
I love this story, and not only because I find it incredibly funny. I love it because it’s a decent metaphor for the practical and spiritual work we tend to do around the turning of the year. Now is the time to take a good look at ourselves in the symbolic mirror, to take stock of who we are and what we’re doing. And, if we find something amiss, now is the time to change, to free ourselves from whatever is preventing us from being fully alive.
Lee’s tale of midnight sunglasses reminds me of the story of Paul’s conversion.* Before he became Paul, the apostle and author of much of the New Testament, Paul was called Saul, and he was a terrible man. He loved nothing more than persecuting the early Christians. Yet one day, on the road to Damascus, Saul was blinded by a light from God. His blindness lasted for three days, during which he prayed in despair and confusion and total darkness. Finally, God sent a man named Ananias to Saul’s bedside. “Brother Saul,” he explained. “The Lord sent me—Jesus, who appeared to you on the way as you were coming here. He sent me so that you could see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And with that, the scales fell from Saul’s eyes and he could see the truth: not only about himself, but about the God whom he had rejected. Saul was immediately baptized into the very faith and fellowship he had gleefully oppressed.
Yes, New Years Day is a wonderful time to reflect, a great day to remove the shades, see clearly, and act accordingly. And what better way to act accordingly than to make New Years resolutions?
Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them. Maybe you make them, maybe you don’t. Maybe you finally quit smoking on account of a successful New Years Resolution. Maybe you’ve learned the hard way that you’re not the kind of person who can drastically change course just because you tacked a new calendar to the wall. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of New Years Resolutions – which is pretty astonishing if you consider the seriousness with which I undertook them when I was a kid.
A couple years ago, while poking around in my parents’ basement, I found an old journal that contains my New Years Resolutions for 1992. I can date the chart quite precisely to that year, since I mentioned the boy I had a crush on at the time. I resolved to stop thinking about him all the time. I also resolved to stop biting my nails, pray more, learn how to do my hair so it looked good, get out of my sisters’ shadows, and find out why boys were such jerks. Note that this is a far from comprehensive list; the list contains twenty different resolutions. It also contains a chart for monitoring my progress; I drew the chart by hand with a ruler, and made check marks each month if I determined that I had improved in that area. You’ll be happy to know I did in fact figure out why boys were such jerks in March of that year, though I regret that I didn’t write down my answer. I’m still not sure that I’ve figured out how to do my hair so it looks good.
I had a good laugh when I found this chart. There’s a bar in New York City that hosts Cringe Nights, where people stand up and read old diary entries to great hilarity. This thing would be an excellent contribution to the fun - I didn’t even go into the complicated longhand mathematics I did in the margins to determine what percentage of my resolutions I had kept each month. But, I also felt a great pang of empathy for the earnest and self-conscious girl I used to be. I want to go back and tell her to calm down, that she doesn’t need this ill-fated plan for self-improvement. I want to go back and tell her she’s good enough.
And maybe that’s why I don’t care for most talk about New Years Resolutions. They have a tendency to prey on our insecurities. They promise change without giving us any tools beyond the strength of our own willpower, which, if you’re anything like me, isn’t always very strong. They set us up to fail – how many people don’t even remember what their resolutions were last year? New Years Resolutions are often like trying to change while we’re still wearing sunglasses at midnight. They don’t show us the truth about who we are, or the truth about the God who made us.
I’m beginning to think that we’re better off skipping the resolutions and trying out something a bit more biblical: repentance.
Repentance is one of those big, heavy theological words that are often cut out of the contemporary Christian vocabulary. But our faith is impoverished without it. We don’t need self-improvement goals destined to trick us into believing we will never be good enough. We need forgiveness from a God who loves us so much he was born in a stable in Bethlehem to save us. When the scales fell from Paul’s eyes and he saw the truth, he didn’t see that he needed to lose five pounds. He saw that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. He saw that he was deeply wrong about the world. He saw that he had terribly mistreated God’s children. And in that moment, he was transformed. He became a new creation: dead to the sin that had previously defined him, alive in Christ.
Paul would later write letters to the church he founded in Corinth. He would write hard words, words of judgment. If we want to keep that sunglasses metaphor going, his letter was like a mirror, reflecting truth back to them. Occasionally his harsh words injured the recipients of his letters. Who likes to be judged, even righteously? Yet in the epistle we read today, Paul writes, “Even though my letter hurt you, I don’t regret it. Well—I did regret it just a bit because I see that that letter made you sad, though only for a short time. Now I’m glad—not because you were sad but because you were made sad enough to change your hearts and lives. You felt godly sadness so that no one was harmed by us in any way. Godly sadness produces a changed heart and life that leads to salvation and leaves no regrets, but sorrow under the influence of the world produces death. Look at what this very experience of godly sadness has produced in you: such enthusiasm, what a desire to clear yourselves of blame, such indignation, what fear, what purpose, such concern, what justice!”
I don’t mean to diminish the importance of losing those five pounds. God knows, our good health matters a great deal. But I do think that Christians should not let ourselves be defined by that extra weight, or that messy desk, or that rising debt, or even that one who broke our heart. We must let God define who we are. If we give into what Paul calls “sorrow under the influence of the world” – well, it’s true: we will never be handsome or rich or successful or well-liked enough to make ourselves truly happy.
We must believe the gospel when it proclaims God loves us so much that he sent his son to save us. If we aren’t living each moment of our lives as a response to that amazing grace, then maybe we are blind. Maybe we need to feel that pang of godly sadness, awakening us to the truth. Let the scales fall from our eyes. Let us repent of our sins, those things we have left undone that we should have done, and those things that we have done that we didn’t have any business doing. Let us rejoice in the gift of forgiveness, watching the divine alchemy that wrests godly joy from godly sadness. And then let’s get on with it already, boldly continuing our journey in the brilliant light of Christ.
*This is in no way to imply that poor exhausted Lee is equivalent to pre-conversion Saul. Don't look too hard at the metaphor or it will dissolve. ;-)
0 response(s):
Post a Comment