The Porpoise Diving Life – Day 76 – Restraint

Day 76

Restraint

While I was Porpoise watching one day, it dawned on me that they’re confined to this huge, salty, bathtub. Yet, we humans are limited as well. We can’t swim like Porpoises, fly like birds, or float in the heavens like the stars.

Years ago, I had the privilege to work with a young man named Bruce. He was a field auditor for a division of a Fortune 500 company we both worked for. He was smart, full of energy and ambition. He was honest and dependable. His job was to complete monthly audits of business inventories we financed across several states. People adored this young man. His work was impeccable and his future was bright.

I had the opportunity to travel with Bruce one day to a meeting. We were late. He was speeding down the freeway. I also noticed that he was not wearing his seatbelt. When we returned to the office I asked Bruce to come in and speak with me for a few minutes. I told him how much I appreciated the quality of the work he did for our company. I shared how much his co-workers and our customers respected him. Bruce began to float. At this point, I looked him directly in the eyes and told him how essential it was to wear his seat belt each and every moment he was in his company car. He squirmed and acknowledged the wisdom of my comment and agreed to comply.

Some six weeks later, Bruce was dead. I had just returned home one Friday evening, having survived another grueling workweek. The phone rang. It was my Operations Manager. The Oregon State Police had called and said our company car had been involved in a fatal traffic accident near Salem, OR. They had identified Bruce as the sole fatality. There had been three cars and one semi-truck trailer involved in the incident. Bruce was the only occupant in any of the vehicles involved who was not wearing his seat belt.

The next day, I met with Bruce’s mother. Bruce was her only child. Her husband had died several years earlier. She was now completely alone, save for a few friends and acquaintances. Bruce’s mom was awash in unbridled grief, blubbering and crying from the depths of her soul. It was difficult to discern what she was saying. I just sat there, listening to her, staring into her broken heart through the window of her tear-filled eyes.

When I got up to get a glass of water in the kitchen, one of her friends tapped me on the shoulder and motioned to an adjacent room. “I hear you’re a man of faith,” she said. “Yes ma’am,” I replied.  “Well, do you believe in a loving God?” she asked. “Yes, ma’am, I do.”  “Do you believe in a powerful God Who’s alive today and able to intervene in this life?” I nodded in the affirmative, looking into fifty-plus year old eyes about to explode amidst the chaos of overwhelming tragedy. “Well so did I,” she said. “Until about 7:00PM last night! Now what the hell do I do?” Her head crumbled into my chest as she burst into a tirade of uncontrollable weeping. I held her in my arms and seated us on the edge of a bed. We wept together.

As I reflect upon this moment in my life, I recall my mind racing to come up with a suitable explanation for this woman. I couldn’t come up with one. I just sat there weeping with her, holding onto one another. Years later, the words of Tony Campolo capture the essence of the despair tragedies like these spring upon our souls: “In the midst of our disappointments with God, we try to come up with rationalizations that will make God look good, even in the face of tragedies that we believe God could have prevented. Sometimes we try to put a good spin on our disappointments by saying that what we wanted wasn’t God’s will. But deep down inside, we are likely to wonder why a God of love whom we believe has the power to make things right didn’t act to do so.”[i]

Power and love: These are the two belts that seem to weave their way through the history of people of faith. We pray that God has the power to spare us from the tragedies that impact the lives of others. When these tragedies strike us, or those close to us, we begin to question that power. We begin to question whether we had the right kind or amount of faith. When the belt of God’s power seems to snap, we begin to contemplate the belt of love. “How could a loving God allow such a thing to occur?” When the belt of God’s love comes unbuckled, we become victims of an even more tragic illusion; that He’s not really here…He doesn’t really care.

It was in the unanticipated embrace of this weeping woman I had never met, that I confronted an unwelcome truth: “Before you can find God in the answers, you have to find him in the questions.”[ii] The Christian life is a gut-wrencher at times. It requires one to live through the questions, wade through unfathomable, and work it out. It’s not a bowl of applesauce. It’s life with God, yourself and others. Real life. As one author points out, “The trouble with working things out is that you have to start to practice what you preach. Intellectual journeys don’t lead to a rest house.”[iii] Neither do spiritual journeys.

I’ve heard people suggest to new Christians, “you’re in for the ride of your life.” What they’re actually referring to is that they have some sort of supernatural protection surrounding them that will quickly transform their lives into something vastly better than the realities of life they may have encountered without it. When I meet these folks a few years later, they unequivocally share one thing with me: “My experience of the Christian life wasn’t anything like what they told me it was going to be at the beginning of my journey. I guess it wasn’t meant to be for me.”

This is where Christians need to exercise more restraint. Perhaps we should be sharing the truth with people: “There’s going to be potholes in the road. You’ll feel lost and alone on more than a few occasions. There will be U-turns, slippery surfaces and dead-ends. You might even want to trade-in your life for somebody else’s. Don’t get disillusioned, that’s life. Jesus is right beside you no matter what you encounter along the way. Buckle up!”

NOTES


[i] Campolo, Tony Which Jesus? – Choosing Between Love & Power, W Publishing Group, A Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Nashville, TN. Copyright © 2002 by Tony Campolo, p. 61.

[ii] McManus, Erwin Raphael Soul Cravings-An Exploration of the Human Spirit, Nelson Books, a Division of Thomas Nelson Publishers, Copyright © 2006, p. Meaning – Entry 7.

[iii] Handy, Charles Beyond Certainty – The Changing Worlds of Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA Copyright © 1996 by Charles Handy, pp. 21-22.

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