In the mesquite groves, what is there to forgive?
In the early days of faith, I remember no significant pains. I was not beaten or abused, nor was I the product of an abusive relationship. (My mother once told me I was the product of a lavish winter party, but that is a story for another day.) I was raised in simple faith, with simple folks, and the eyes of my memory were opened to the heart of dusty Texas country.
It is true, my father was either absent or asleep a great deal in my younger days. He was a dockworker on the night shift in Dallas. I remember no bitterness or anger over this fact. Even at that age, I knew that a man has to do what a man has to do. I do not remember things as tumultuous or violent or otherwise sour like so many others might. Instead, life was fresh, new, and if I try, I can still smell the greenness of faith in my memory.
I am there, in the field, at odds with no one so long as I stay a healthy distance away from the cattle pond when I’m dressed in my Sunday best. I am on the low branches of the trees and humming nothing in particular, as six-year-olds are prone to do. I talk to God as if he is my playmate, and in a way he is. I ask him about Adam and Eve, ask him if he ever gets hacked off at their first sin, at how they ruined everything. I muster a childlike sense of justice. I know now that God must have smiled at my naïveté.
This, I think, is the hallmark of childhood faith. Untouched by pain, by death, we see with the simplest eyes, take things at face value. We are most alive.
Along the way, though, the poison of seeing, touching, tasting, and experiencing the taint of all knowing—the taint of sin—sets in. There are none unaffected by the sting of sickness, death, and sin. What’s more, there are none who do not afflict others with the poison of their own sin. This has been the way of humanity since the garden of Eden.
I felt the first sting when I was told I could be healed and wasn’t. I felt the sting when well-intentioned friends said that Titus would be healed because I was a man of faith, and that God had ordained his sickness to bring him more glory, and that God hadn’t given me more than I could bear.
There is a universal truth in the human experience: we are all the walking bitten; we are all stung by our fellow humans. And here’s the rub: I’ve stung others along the way, maybe some of you.
Consider it: haven’t you felt the poison of the lying, cheating, abusing world? Haven’t those with well-meaning words wounded you? Hasn’t the venom of manipulation coagulated in your veins? Haven’t you harbored bitterness, unforgiveness, doubt in your fellow man, doubt in God? Hasn’t it become your best pet malady?
It is mine.
I consider the faith healer, the hospital visitor, the hapless word-wielders. Insensitive brutes they may have been, but aren’t they also infected? Aren’t they manipulated too? Aren’t they, for the most part, just doing the best they know how, even if operating from a low emotional intelligence?
Just ask Cain and Abel: humans hurt humans. Sometimes it is volitional; sometimes it is carried out with genocidal intent or for ill-gotten gain or as a power play. More often, though, I wonder whether we’re all grasping at straws, and whether sometimes, in the middle of the desperate, floundering attempts to grab the longest one, we overreach and sucker punch another in the jaw.
Not every pain is the result of ill intent. There are fewer sociopaths and more broken, confused, flailing folks than any of us would like to admit.