9 
Layers of Self-Insight
They walked for a minute or two in silence.
“I am always struck with how peaceful life seems to become once you get out of the city,” sighed Timothy at length. “I should definitely do it more often. This setting is so beautiful. There is something about the sounds and smells and sight of the sea that cannot help but get into your spirit.”
Amanda nodded. After another several steps, Timothy spoke again.
“You’ve been thinking about your father, haven’t you?”
“How did you know?” replied Amanda softly.
“For one who understands something of what you are going through, it is not difficult to see.” Timothy paused, then added, “My ears and heart are open if you would like to share your thoughts with one who also loved him.”
Amanda nodded reflectively.
“It will take me a long time,” she said as they went, “to fit everything together. There is so much to get used to, so many changes. More thoughts have been tumbling through my brain than I know what to do with. I’ve been such a slow learner.”
She paused briefly, struggling to find the right words.
“Please don’t think me stupid, Timothy,” she said. “I know it is a simple thing, but I think I am finally realizing how important it is what kind of person you make of yourself.”
“I would never think you stupid, Amanda,” said Timothy.
“But I have been. Maybe you are too kind to say it, but I can.”
“We all have lessons to learn in life—myself no less than you,” said Timothy. “Truth comes to us in layers of deepening insight. We each have to reach the point, through the circumstances of our lives and through the consequences of our choices, where we are able to peel off successively more of those layers.”
“That is a good description,” said Amanda. “But it feels like I’m peeling off my skin. It hurts to see what I have been.”
“Some truth is painful,” Timothy agreed. “And what may appear a simple realization for one individual may represent half a lifetime’s struggle for another.”
“But why should truth be painful?”
“Because the uncovered layers bite deep into the heart and soul of each of us uniquely. And if there is sin to deal with in the process, the revelations hurt.”
Amanda did not reply. That fact she knew only too well.
“You are now learning truths,” Timothy went on, “that some men and women never discover. Do not think your growth insignificant because it comes now and did not come sooner in your life.”
“But it would have been so much better had I begun the process long ago.”
“In some ways perhaps. But there are other ways in which you may not have been ready for it until now. Who can say why? The story of your life is like no one else’s, as is mine, your father’s, your mother’s, Catharine’s, George’s, even little Betsy’s, whose story we don’t even know.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Don’t forget, even your father did not turn his face toward the Lord until his late thirties. We all must respond to God in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”
“I see what you mean,” Amanda nodded.
“And, too, I believe that everything occurs by God’s timing. Therefore, the development of your faith is in his hands. Your responsibility is to fall in with it now that it has come, exactly as your father and mother did when that moment of response came for them.”
“Thank you, Timothy,” said Amanda. “You have always been so kind to me, more kind than I deserve. I will always regret how I used to treat you. I don’t know how you can stand me.”
“Amanda, please, don’t even think it,” rejoined Timothy. “But tell me what you were reflecting on a moment ago when I met you.”
“About what I used to be like,” replied Amanda with a sad smile.
She paused briefly. Timothy waited.
“When I was younger I always thought I wanted to make a difference,” Amanda went on, “to do great things, to change the world. That’s why I left home. But I was so naive and self-centered. I looked at Father and Mother after they became Christians and thought they were accomplishing nothing of value. Yet now I see how much influence they actually had in so many lives in the community.”
“Not just in Devon,” added Timothy, “but in London as well.”
“The outpouring of affection that I have seen toward my father since I came home, and toward Mother too, has been remarkable,” Amanda continued. “There’s no one who doesn’t have a story to tell about something one of them did.”
“I’m certain it would be the same if you could question the men your father served with in Parliament.”
“I never saw all that before. I don’t know how I could have been so blind all those years. It has made me realize that God’s way is different than I always assumed, upside down from how I used to look at things. I wanted to change the world by a massive stroke, like my joining the suffragette movement. What I find myself thinking now is that perhaps God would have people change it one little piece at a time, even if in ways that are invisible to others.”
“A keen insight, Amanda. That was something your father certainly believed.”
Amanda nodded. “He understood far more than I gave him credit for,” she said, “such as that the kind of person you are becoming is more important than what you do. That is the part of the world we are most supposed to change one little bit at a time, isn’t it?—ourselves.”
They walked along for some moments in silence.
“Our father taught us to think, and to think in big ways,” Amanda went on. “It was probably his greatest gift to George, Catharine, and me as we were growing up. So many snatches of conversation now come back to me, times when he would probe and question us.”
“I can envision it even as you describe it.”
“He always tried to stretch our minds and how we looked at things. Yet I used that gift to turn away from him. Not very logical, is it?”
“Young people aren’t usually terribly logical in their responses.”
“He gave me freedom to think and dream in ways many fathers don’t. He encouraged us to imagine possibilities, to look at every side of a question, even to disagree with him, in order to sharpen our brains and our thinking skills. My father was following God’s example, wasn’t he, Mr. Diggorsfeld—excuse me, Timothy—in the way God gave man free will. My father gave me free thought, so to speak, by training my mind when I was young. It breaks my heart to realize what I did with such a gift.”
She turned away, eyes flooding with tears.
“I thought one of your resentments,” Timothy probed, “used to be that he urged you toward Christian ideas. I thought you were angry at being forced to adopt his value system.”
Amanda thought a moment.
“Yes, I suppose I did resent that,” she said at length. “My mixed-up reactions still confuse me. At the time I thought he and Mother were trying to control every aspect of my life. I felt constrained by it.”
“Yet now you are talking about the freedom and latitude he gave you?”
“Freedom is the last word I would have used to describe it back then,” rejoined Amanda with a sad smile. “Yet now everything looks different. They really did give us freedom, didn’t they? But not the kind of freedom my immaturity wanted. I’m certain both George and Catharine would say it was a very liberating environment in which to grow up, while I found it constraining. The difference was because of me, wasn’t it? Not Mother and Father. I thought I was escaping their restraints by leaving home, when actually all I was doing was living out the consequences of my wrong use of that freedom.”
“Might it be,” suggested Timothy, “that your father gave you intellectual and imaginative freedom by encouraging you to think in large and diverse ways, while in the area of attitudes, behavior, and how you treated others, he expected you to obey certain standards?”
“That may be it exactly,” nodded Amanda, “the distinction between attitudes and behavior on the one hand, and the intellect on the other. My parents didn’t give us the same latitude ethically and behaviorally that they did creatively and intellectually. You’re right, they expected a standard of respect and gracious behavior.”
“Does that seem so unfair to you now?”
“Not at all,” replied Amanda. “Why I resented those restraints on my independence is hard to understand. As I look back, it seems that they were insisting on nothing more than common sense and normal kindness. All parents try to teach their children proper attitudes and behavior, don’t they? The problem with me was that I was so completely self-centered, so filled with selfish attitudes, that I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.”