oily rag world

There was once was a woman madly in love with... lust. She thought life was her personal graphic romance novel, and pursued sex, experience, pleasure with mindless abandon.

Talking to a chick at the bookstore, she freely shared that she’d left her husband with his head in his hands earlier that day, as she randomly sexted some guy she met at the movies an hour before. Then she smiled lasciviously, leaning over, making it obvious that she wasn’t wearing a bra… and asked the girl to dinner.

Rebuffed and unaffected, she sat, sipping a coffee while she alternately sexted, and flirted with, well, every man, woman, and book in the store.

She thought God would fix her, and when that didn’t work (what with Him not being ok with her making stupid, unsafe decisions and her not being ok with having to not make them anymore), she dumped Him and picked up two more sext partners on the way home.

(The fact that she was married, her husband was a straight-laced, vanilla monogamous man, and the sex she had with whomever, wherever, however was never safe were minor details, offered in that bored tone usually reserved for the weather and parents of teenagers.)

She was the main character in the story in her head, and she was determined to make reality submit to the role she had chosen to play.

My friend, Mike, and I were talking a bit ago, and it came up in conversation that he was concerned he was becoming “that guy” – the guy whose ego filled Jerry’s temple; the guy that pushed because he could; the guy who parked his bicycle in a car-sized parking space. At an angle. Yeah, that guy.

He went on, saying that there’s this idea that it doesn’t matter what you say, but how it’s taken that matters. And how if that’s the world where we live, without a serious counterweight, we totally buy our own hype. We become the roles we’d rather play, not the people that we need to be.

That idea has really rumbled through my head since he said it. Seems like especially recently, there are rampant examples of what happens when people decide what they want is far, far more important than anything else (like laws or basic ethics). The epic fail that was the supercommittee in Washington and the former coach at Penn immediately springs to mind, but this very obvious idea also weeds out very subtle intertwinings, too.

Which is what made me think of the woman I knew in another life, and of Nehemiah.

Nehemiah was a dude in one of the smaller books of the Bible few know exists, let alone have read. It’s in the back, really short. There are no miracles in his book, no stars or water-to-wine. He’s a bureaucrat, a politician. And his life’s ambition is to build a wall. Yep, it’s a page-turner.

Except that’s seriously sort of awesome. It’s full of really good stuff that takes time to really absorb.

For instance, at one point Nehemiah’s in a room with a bunch of unethical moneylenders who claim a label of faith. He calls them all on what they’re doing, and since he represents more political power than they do, they do a lot of head-nodding and mea culpea’s.

He doesn’t believe that they’ll do anything differently after he leaves – and says so. Nehemiah even goes so far to say, if you don’t follow through with this, it’s not on you, and you don’t have to worry about me. The God you serve will attend you.

And in the middle of his shaming, he makes an interesting statement:

⁶ When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry. ⁷ I pondered them in my mind and then accused the nobles and officials. I told them, “You are charging your own people interest!” So I called together a large meeting to deal with them ⁸ and said: “As far as possible, we have bought back our fellow Jews who were sold to the Gentiles. Now you are selling your own people, only for them to be sold back to us!” They kept quiet, because they could find nothing to say.

 ⁹ So I continued, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies? ¹¹ Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the interest you are charging them—one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil.”  (Nehemiah 5:6-9, 11)

The bankers and those with names and power only saw what they wanted to see, and not what was. The exquisitely humble Francis Chan has a prayer phrasing it this way: “I know I have cravings that sway and distort my ability to reason.” What we want to be, what we want to see is not what is. We have to be reminded just because we want it to be does not make it so.

All of this culminated in my head this past Sunday. Sitting in a pretty church with stained glass, I listened to a video head pastor. He said God tried to give us perfection first, but that pain is the gift we understood.

We are made of a broken world and we see unclearly. Perfection doesn’t make sense. So God gave us the gift of pain, which tells us something is wrong. Pain hurts, driving those things that distract us from our sight. Pain sheers away anything else, and remains like nothing else.

We weren’t created to only see pain, or continue trying to right our sight. And we weren’t created to escape into the sensation of constant pain, either.

We were created to worship, and to serve.

And we, I, you, need to be reminded we see not rightly. We find fault with perfection, and celebrate our limitations as if they were achievements. Because our limitations were at least our choice. And to paraphrase Rich Mullins, we’d rather fight God for something we don’t really want, than take what He offers, that we need.

We do what is not right. We sneer at perfection, and numb ourselves to escape pain. We become roles we shouldn’t have been playing in the first place, then wonder why our world seems overflowing with oily rags. We are that guy.

And still our lover waits, offering home and open arms.