Day 70
Feet first
Porpoise calves are born tail first from the safety of their mother’s womb into a frigid, unfamiliar environment. They surface immediately to breathe.” [i]
Serena showed up on the front porch of our home one night. She was living with her sister and brother-in-law in the area and had been attending a local church. Things weren’t working out very well at all for Serena. She didn’t fit in with the squared away folks at her church. She was driving her sister’s husband nuts. Their marriage was starting to suffer because of Serena’s dysfunction (Yeah, right…like these people had it all together before Serena ever began living with them). Out of desperation, Serena’s sister began calling around in an attempt to identify a group of Christians that Serena might fit in with. She found us.
Serena had been in a near fatal car crash several years earlier. The accident left her with a permanent neurological impairment. She suffered from what is now referred to as a head trauma. This condition caused certain emotional imbalances to cope with as part of a cognitive deficiency. She was prone to anxiety attacks, memory deficiency, grossly misinterpreting communication from others, and the inability to exercise logic and common sense. Over a period of several years, Serena had exhausted a few dozen psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, social workers and vocational rehabilitation professionals. She had huge trust issues. After the accident, a caregiver raped her. Friends from her church group borrowed from her. Truth be told, they stole Serena’s insurance settlement funds that were intended to provide for her ongoing medical care. She had a new job as a maid in a senior convalescent center. She was terrified about the prospect of failing in the eyes of her employer.
Serena’s impairments had the capacity to dominate a gathering of people with the sheer depth of her wounds. The various reactions of people to Serena always befuddled me. Some people would be immediately drawn into her brokenness, authentically empathizing with her. Others would just stare at the ground; silently wishing “I wish she would shut up and leave!” Still others would take a more spiritual approach. These people were the one’s who had met Serena typically for the first or second time in our fellowship group. They were absolutely convinced that Serena’s difficulties were wholly due to the fact that her beliefs about God were in some way deficient. After our gathering ended, these well-intentioned folks would open their Bible’s and spend the next hour going through an itemized list of tenets of faith that Serena would eagerly acknowledge. They would pray with her and leave. Typically, they wouldn’t return. After witnessing a few of these scenes, my wife and I decided to run interference for Serena, when another well-intentioned approach was obviously forming for her benefit. Jacki and I would head off the folks who were obviously about to pounce upon Serena and take her to the side to have her say the sinner’s prayer again, insuring her position in God’s family and verifying whether or not Serena’s beliefs and faith were sufficient to return her to health.
The purveyors of the biblical worldview have based its valuation on the gold standard that you must believe before you belong. You must buy into a certain number of component beliefs before you are really one of us. If you actually possess a nickels worth of these beliefs and claim to be a dime like the rest of us, you’re five pennies short of where you need to be. That’s the way Serena was treated by far too many Christians.
We’ve even developed some nice names for folks whose lives don’t seem to match up with the promises of a biblical worldview like notional, nominal, deficient, church hopping commie, seeker or just plain lost. If you don’t verbalize that you buy into all of the life changing tenets of faith that make up the biblical worldview, well, They’ll pray for you. Maybe you’ve memorized the ideas that comprise a biblical worldview. Well, more bad news, as Donald Miller says, “I don’t think memorizing ideas helps anybody understand the meaning inferred in the expression of those ideas. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person’s soul, into their being, before they can effect change, and lists rarely sink deeply into a person’s soul.”[ii] Then again, what do you do with folks like Serena who have a neurological deficit that has impaired their ability to remember much of anything?
Serena’s story taught me, my wife and a whole host of others some very important lessons. One of which is, “Sometimes belonging must precede believing.”[iii] Have you ever walked into a gathering of Christians and get that eerie feeling from one of the first people you meet? You can literally hear their mind asking that infamous question, “I wonder if he/she is one of us…if they believe the right stuff?” Man, I sure have. I know I’m not alone. It’s akin to greeting someone aloud by saying, “Hi! Clearly, your beliefs are deficient in some way you don’t quite understand yet. Don’t worry, we’re here to fix you!”
Perhaps it’s time to move toward a new way of living whose value is a more authentic reflection of Christ to the world that says, “what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”[iv] However, why we do some of the things we do to wounded people in the name of Christ is, for me, despicable. Why some of God’s creations are born head first, feet first, hatched or otherwise, I don’t pretend to understand. I do know this; He adores the wounded child just as much as the healthy one. It is a responsibility and privilege in this life to invite, embrace and experience the gift of the wounded among us. Perhaps we must move toward a deeper appreciation for what it means to become people equipped to live compassionately, as stated in the following: “Just as courage takes its stand by others in challenging situations, so compassion takes its stand with others in their distress. Compassion is a virtue that takes seriously the reality of other persons, their inner lives, their emotions, as well as their external circumstances. It is an active disposition toward fellowship and sharing, toward supportive companionship in distress or in woe.”[v] The people you might think were born feet first just might be the greatest teachers of the Gospel you have ever met. Just swim with em. Christianity in the postmodern world just may have it backward. Instead of diving in head first, maybe we need to wade into life of faith feet first. Perhaps we are the head-injured. Not Serena.
NOTES
[i] Read, Andrew Porpoises Voyageur Press, Inc. Vancouver, B.C. Canada © 1999 by Andrew Read, p. 25.
[ii] Miller, Donald Searching For God Knows What, Thomas Nelson, Inc. Nashville, TN, Copyright 2004 by Donald Miller, p. 57.
[iii] McLaren, Brian D. More Ready Than You Realize – Evangelism As a Dance in the Postmodern Matrix, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI. © Copyright 2002 by Brian D. McLaren p. 84.
[iv] Miller, Donald, Blue Like Jazz – Non-Religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, Thomas Nelson, Inc. Nashville, TN, © Copyright 2003 by Donald Miller, p. 110 & 111
[v] Bennett, William J., The Book of Virtues – A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, SIMON & SCHUSTER, New York, NY © 1993 by William J. Bennett, p. 107.
