Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Filling in the Blanks

Fill in the blank:

If people really knew ________ about me, I'm not entirely sure they would love me.

It doesn't have to be a great mystery or a deep dark secret. But you know that the blank is there. Maybe there are lots of things you could fill that blank with. 

The blank is that something-that-separates-us-from-each-other. It's that broken part of ourselves that we try to make sense of. It's that thing you talk around so that you don't have to talk about.

I recently re-read the story in the Gospel of the woman caught in adultery that the crowd wants to stone. Jesus somehow disperses the crowd, somehow sends every would-be stone thrower away. And then he says something amazing: "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more." 

He really sees the woman and knows who she is. Go and sin no more. He doesn't hide the fact that he knows what she has done and who she has been. She is completely known. How does she bear that?

Neither do I condemn you. He knows her completely. And loves her completely. She is both known and loved.

We hold those two truths with us at all times -- the One who knows us best is the One who loves us the most. We let that truth sink in and penetrate and carve out a space in our hearts until there is space for compassion and forgiveness, until we know in our bones that the One who knows us and loves us also knows others more and loves them more deeply than we are capable of.

And then -- then life begins to happen. We are known, which means our smallness is known; we don't have to pretend anymore. We can give up all the things we thought made us worthy of love, all of those things that we thought might fill that blank space, and start living in that all-consuming, all-knowing, all-freeing love. We can laugh at ourselves.

We start living. Which isn't particularly exciting on the surface. We imagine a perfect morning and then hit the snooze button three times instead. We get up in the morning and go to work, and sometimes we don't want to but we do it anyway, and we try to do it with a smile and sometimes we fail at that, too. We answer our e-mails. We go about our small, everyday tasks. 

But in filling that space, in knowing and in experiencing our weaknesses, in loving us even though we are weak, Christ grants us a freedom to be small -- to embrace the smallness of the blind man who cries out for help, the smallness of Peter, who is willing to walk on water, the smallness of the woman about to be stoned. In each of these stories, you can almost feel the immediate freedom that comes from each of these people encountering Christ and handing him their smallness.

And so it is with us. Our small, everyday tasks have meaning. They give us reasons to laugh and to cry on a daily basis. And more than that, we begin to see that our real task is to love each other as Christ loved that woman. Our real task is to suspend our judgment and our gossiping and our manipulation. Our real task is to put down the stones that we want to throw and to speak hope to that blank space inside each human heart: You are known. You are loved.


2 comments:

  1. Love this post Barbara! Very deep, but at the same time relatable. I like the story of the woman Jesus meets at the well, who is living with a man who is not her husband. When I find myself judging too much, I think of two other passages too: 1) Luke 7:37ff, the parable of two people being forgiven debts of different amounts; and the "Judge not lest ye be judged" adage.

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  2. Thanks for the suggestions! I re-read the story of the woman at the well after I saw your comment. I love what she says when she goes back to town -- "Come see a man who told me everything I ever did."

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