No one is likely to stab me for being ambitious. Sometimes I
wish someone might see the flame of self-promotion in me and seek to snuff it
out with his steely blade that I might not interfere with his rise to the top
of whatever it is that we’re duty bound to rise to the top of.
I’m just not a riser anymore. But, I can’t work up any shame
in the fact. Once upon a time I was. I wanted to achieve lofty goals; I wanted
to be the best at everything I set my hand to--- in that competitive ME way. I
wanted the trappings of the best,
recognition and stuff. But then my son’s battle with cancer stripped the
ambition away.
When he got sick, I didn’t want to be the best anything but
a Dad. I had always wanted that, but the
battle with cancer whipped that desire into overdrive. The nagging feeling that
time as Jacob’s Dad would very likely be short pressed in from all sides, but
intuitively I knew that the only way to be the kind of Dad I needed to be meant
teaching and treating Jacob like he would live to be 80. Yet, an 80 year old man wouldn’t be enough. Really,
Cancer invests fathering with a sense of urgency. For the
longest I couldn’t decide if my urgency was a lack of faith that Jacob would be
healed or simply the recognition that fathering requires urgency at all times
because death keeps no clocks and runs on no schedules. I had every confidence
that the Lord could heal Jacob but no assurance that he would. No assurance
that His will would bend to mine and my son would live a long long time.
It wasn’t so much that I crammed stuff in, but the battle afforded
uncounted opportunities to teach. Every difficulty proved to be a teachable
moment. Every difficulty required that I father and that I be Fathered. Every
difficulty required the mustering of courage, the mustering of faith, the
mustering of perseverance. And even still the doubt would creep in, the feeling that God and Scripture could not
be trusted. I taught Jacob what Scripture said anyway. Feelings are liars. I
know that now.
For a little over three years, we fought on, Jacob, Heather
and I. I fathered she mothered Jacob grew into a man. He died a man at the age
of nine, the best man I have ever known.
After he died ambition lay moldering in the ash heap,
without the power of a phoenix. It will certainly never rise again in its
former iteration. I’ve learned to love different things now. It’s just that none of them are things.
I am terrified. That my faith -- particularly my belief that God listens to my prayers -- creeps on the edge of a long winter night. That I keep my seat in God's house and teach my children of his ways only because I cannot find a better alternative to the Xian story of human purpose and existence. I feel a little ashamed of that, too; it's not exactly the best motive to do either of those things. You speak of having lost ambition, but I speak of a doubt whose ambit waxes with every new season. I believe you when you say feelings are liars, but it's my thoughts that trouble me: could Jesus have been mistaken when he said that whatever his disciples ask the Father in Jesus' name the Father would give? That seems a relatively straightforward proposition, but it appears -- from my experience -- that it is at best cryptic, requiring all manner of expositor to explain its "true" (hidden?) meaning. Why would Jesus commit himself to such a statement, one that doesn't appear to be what it appears to be? I feel like Huck Finn trying out prayer in the woods only to discover it don't work too well.
ReplyDeleteAnd so I pray and sing, and teach and remind, but feel like a sham. Sure, feelings are liars. But what about my thoughts, my doubts?
I don’t know why we are always so surprised and disappointed in our doubts. We are in good company. John the Baptist needed reassurance, Doubting Thomas, James the brother of Jesus, all of Christ’s followers for that matter wallowed in doubts and fears after the crucifixion. Then the physical presence of Jesus or in John’s case a direct word from the physical Jesus reassures. I suspect the desire for physical evidence springs from our origin as a people made for and satisfied by God’s presence. Our roots in the physical should give way to the winds of the Spirit more readily, but they don’t. We incline to the material world. But, once upon a time we thought more highly of Spiritual things.
ReplyDeleteMuch of this life for a Christian strikes me as a walk on the road to Emmaus. We walk along with Jesus at our sides and don’t even know he’s Jesus. This of course has nothing at all to do with the fact that he is still Jesus. Then we find something of the familiar in his words or deeds and are elated at the revelation that he has been with us all along.
Your “weakness” is far from uncommon and seems to me a confirmation that we were made for God’s presence where no dark glass obscures our vision. We will have that someday, but not yet.
I also suspect much of our trouble in prayer stems from a deep seated reluctance to embrace “thy will be done” coupled with a frantic impatience. It is hard to kill our will and harder still to wait on His. When the bus is late, we suspect it will never arrive or that it never existed at all.
I think we can both agree that Huck Finn approaches prayer in the same way he approaches the genie in the bottle, at least early in the story. Later he can’t pray because his prayer would be false. He “can’t pray a lie.” I think we are often caught praying lies and more often than not unintentionally. We live in a world of lies and falsehoods, in enemy territory. The propaganda is everywhere. Our struggle is the same one our parents had: Has God really said…?