Manipulation

My first childhood friends were two little boys who lived on my street—Billy and Shawn.  We were all about three years of age, and we played together in each other’s yards.  One summer day, while we were playing on my swing set, I cut my finger on the ragged edge of one of the chain links.  (Children born after 1990 will not relate to this, but backyard equipment wasn’t always covered in protective plastic.  Times were hard, back in the day . . .).  My injury was pretty severe and required at least one Band-aid, as I recall.  After being treated with a little First Aid from my mom, I returned outside, gingerly favoring my finger, and settled back down onto my swing with the following announcement:  “Since I’m hurt, you have to pick me flowers.”   Neither Billy nor Shawn had a sister--and thus were not schooled in the wiles of a woman.  And so they picked flowers for me.  Poor little me, swinging carefully with one hand cradled so that my finger would not fall off, while they ran around the yard like slaves, grabbing dandelions and clover, bestowing me with bouquets to offer condolences for my suffering.  It was a glorious day. 

 

Manipulation is fun.  Not gonna lie.  Sometimes you just need some flowers. 

 

But manipulation is more than fun.  It’s a form of disrespect and deception, and unfortunately, it’s a temptation for all of us.  It’s the tool of victims, the badge of desperation that announces—more loudly than we realize—“The truth alone isn’t strong enough to accomplish what I want.” 

 

I wish I could tell you that I have never used manipulation on anyone since the Backyard Swing Incident of 1974.  But it’s human nature to dabble in areas that we ought to leave to God and others.  Maybe I’m not the only one who has been tempted to manipulate.  Sometimes we parents and teachers give in to our children's manipulative behavior, thereby reinforcing it.  Any behavior that tries to maneuver competent decision makers into doing what they would not choose to do is manipulation.  And it takes on a few disguises . . . 

 

1.  Victimization 

 

Victimization seeks sympathy or complements out of others.  I like the quote I heard recently:  “Whining announces to predators that there is a victim in the room.”  Coerced sympathy doesn’t satisfy—which is why it has to be repeated. All of us need to rise to our challenges and claim the promise of Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”  Parents, when we adjust the rules or the demands in favor of whining and pouting, we are rewarding selfishness and raising manipulators who will exercise their skill on others someday.

 

2.  Threats

 

“If you make me run that far, I will quit the team.” 

Older children know what is expected of them, and therefore they sometimes think they have a bargaining tool.  I had a boy at church once who refused to use a seatbelt in my van.  Of course, we could not leave the parking lot until he was belted.  When I reached across to buckle him, he growled, "I will bite you!"  Maybe he would; maybe he wouldn't.  I kind of like my skin, so I called his mom.  He rode home in her vehicle, in a seatbelt.  Threats of bad behavior should never be allowed to win the desired outcome, or Mom, you have just signed up for more of the same.  We need to ask the Lord to show us where there is truly an actual problem ("When I eat that food, it makes me feel sick.") and when we are being toyed with.   

 

3.  Anger and scenes

 

I once watched a mother at Dollar General, arguing with her pre-schooler over a toy. The little girl wanted a doll, and the mother kept saying, “No!”  Over and over the little girl argued, until finally she was crying and stomping her feet.  In exasperation the mother grabbed the toy and said, “Oh, fine!”  and put it into the cart!  Well played, Little Girl!   Had that mother simply marched her daughter out of the store and said, “You will never get anything you cry for,” a hundred battles would have been won that day.   

 

And a word of warning to parents of toddlers:  Two-year-olds are teenagers in training.  There’s a lot riding on the battles you wage today over toys, vegetables, and bedtimes.  Win lovingly.  Win well.    

 

4.  Falsehood

 

Presenting partial truths is a tool for altering other people’s perceptions and claiming victory.  Advertisers do this every day in the form of crafted commercials.  Sometimes it helps me to ask myself, “If this person knew more information, would it change their decision?”   Manipulation is subtle, and the Bible says that we don’t even know our own hearts completely.  “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” 

 

5.  Drama and comedy

 

 A common tool of the “class clown,” drama and comedy shift authority to the one who is getting the focus.  Making jokes when it’s time to be serious; creating conflict and drama when the attention ought to be elsewhere; crying over things that don’t call for tears—all of these are handy for distracting attention from the real issues at hand and affecting other people’s decisions. 

 

For those whose lives are filled with drama, Proverbs reminds us where “drama” finds its source:  “Only by pride cometh contention.” 

 

6.  Public Warfare

 

In my classes at church, I simply send children back to the adult service if they are determined to contest me publically, because I know that everyone is watching to see if they will win.   Sometimes we moms and teachers just need to say, “We’re done talking.”  Public warfare lures us into conversations that almost inevitably lead us to say more than we should say. 

 

I can’t really talk about public warfare without mentioning Facebook.  I think we all have made the mistake, somewhere along the way, of attending an argument we should have declined.   Publically chastising someone through a Facebook status—when there are usually at least 250 other innocent bystanders who will read that status and wonder what they did to earn the scolding—is not only unfair.  It’s unbiblical.  It draws outsiders into a personal dispute.  If it’s worth mentioning at all, then it’s worth mentioning in private (Matthew 18).  And if it’s not worth a personal confrontation, then it probably falls under the “forebear and forgive” category.    

 

7.  Silence and withholding relationships

 

It sounds noble, since it’s the polar opposite from the methods of our Public Warfare and Drama Queen manipulators.  But silence is not always golden. 

 

I love the cartoon I once saw of the husband and wife on each side of their bed:  with a fence of curled barbed wire dividing them.  The husband looks over and says meekly to his wife, “Apparently I have done something to offend you?” 

 

Poor Jason.  He has had to reach across barbed wire a few times in the last nineteen years to make restititution.  And when he did, I was the one in the wrong, no matter what he had originally done to make me upset.  To hold a silent grudge is to live in the assumption that the other person cannot change.   

 

 

 

God is in the business of changing people (most of all--me!), and He loves the person I may be tempted to manipulate.  To live by faith is to trust the Lord to handle my life without using deception and disrespect.  God is big enough for that task! 

 

 

What No Longer Matters

When all that matters is Jesus and His kingdom, there is a long list of things that no longer matter to me. 

 

1.  What others think of me

2.  What I think of others

3.  What I will obtain in this life

4.  Who gets the credit

5.  Who gets the blame

6.   Why it happened

7.  Why they have more

8.  Why I have less

9.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way

10.  Discomfort

11.  No one understands

12.  Insults

13.  I can’t                       

14.  The past

15.  The future

16.  Other people’s decisions

17.  Who worked harder

18.  Who deserves more

19.  It’s not fair

20.  People get away with sin

21.  What I don’t like about myself

22.  What doesn’t change

 

 . . . and 100 more. 

 

 

 

We took a missions trip in 1998 to Yucatan, Mexico for a week with our youth group.  While we were there, we met a Mexican national pastor who lived in a small, cinder-block home.  He worked 12 hours a day on highway construction, 5 – 6 days a week, and then served as the senior pastor of his church.  He had two teenage daughters, and he asked us to pray that he would someday be able to raise about $600.00 so that he could add an enclosure to his makeshift “bathroom,” so that his teenage daughters could take showers without fear of neighbors seeing them. 

 

I’ve never forgotten that pastor.  Whenever life has seemed “unfair,” and whenever I have been tempted to focus on myself and on the inequities of life—secretly wondering how pastors can join golf clubs while my husband gets up every morning at 4:30 to drive a school bus—the face of that Mexican pastor comes to my mind.  I’m sure he is still working on blistering hot highways to make a living.  No, Kristie, life isn’t fair.  You have a ceiling fan at night, an indoor bathroom, and three meals a day while one of God’s most dedicated servants bathes outside.  It's not fair.   

 

It was John the Baptist who said, “He must increase and I must decrease.”  And he did.  It was his severed head that was eventually served up for entertainment at Herod’s banquet.  There is hardly a more devastating way to decrease. 

 

And so we accept that the purpose and mission of this life is not about us at all:  It's all about Jesus.  We lay all of our questions at His feet and “let patience have her perfect work.”  God can use anything in His recipe for good to shape us into His image and to achieve His perfect will.

                         

Remember--He once used a cross.          

 

Chainsaws and Music Lessons

When I was in the 8^th grade, I asked for flute lessons.  My band teacher had recommended that I find a teacher that summer, sensing that I needed more help with theory.  While working in her flowerbeds one day, my mom had a conversation with our neighbor, Mr. Tobin.  Mr. and Mrs. Tobin were the kind of neighbors who gave loving audience to our entire childhoods.  They watched us learn how to walk in the backyard in the early 1970’s; they worried us through our tree-climbing stage; they forgave us for kicking the kickball too hard into their red wooden fence; they hired my brothers to mow their lawn; and even now, decades later and wheel-chair bound, they still sit in their same kitchen and ask my mom how we are doing.  It is fitting that my story of music would begin with Mr. Tobin. 

                     

As God had planned it, Mr. Tobin has a niece who is a professional flutist.  At that time, she was a 19-year-old college student, still living at home—just a block from our house.  Mr. Tobin told my mom about his niece, and my mom went to visit her and ask about music lessons.  That summer, God answered the desire of my heart by placing me under the tutelage of an enthusiastic, cheerful, and exemplary flutist who agreed to take on just one student during her break, charging us a mere $4 a lesson.  Once, when she forgot about a lesson, she taught me anyway:  In her pajamas!  I loved my lessons with Mary. She taught me for five years, until she left to earn her degree at Ithaca and open a studio.   In those five years, she fixed my bad habits and introduced me to great composers, but most of all, she taught me how to love music.   I wish I could find her again and thank her.  The book I am using to teach Kaitlyn right now is the very same method book Mary used for me.  Her handwriting is spilled all over it, with dates for our lessons in 1984 and reminders to “use more support!”  Our $4 went a long, long way. 

 

There are many misnomers about music lessons and music performance.  From the perspective of a student, a teacher, and a parent, I’d like to share some of my simple observations about children and music. 

 

And Mary--wherever you are—Thanks. 

 

1.  Have a clear goal. 

 

Why do you want your child to play an instrument or take voice lessons?  This will instruct how you approach lessons.  And our goals really can vary. 

 

Some kids clearly do not show any inclination toward music.  I’m not supposed to admit that, in this generation of “We’re all awesome at EVERYTHING!”  But it’s true.  Some kids really are better with a basketball or a scientific calculator than a violin bow.  But that doesn’t mean they should quit. 

 

Music is one of the few disciplines that utilize both hemispheres of the brain, which is why it is used in brain therapy for stroke victims.  When Gabby Gifford (the senator who suffered a gunshot wound to the brain) was trying to recover her language skills, her therapist taught her to sing words that she could not speak.  It created new pathways into her brain, and she was able to regain some of her language that way.  Since most music involves manual dexterity, music lessons also enhance fine motor skills.   For wind instruments, there is an added benefit.  When I took swim lessons, I realized that my lung capacity allowed me to swim longer-than-usual distances underwater.  Yea flute!  Children who work hard at music are always rewarded in some way—even if not on a platform. 

 

2.  There is no substitute for practice. 

 

It’s just in the math:  Lessons last 30 – 45 minutes a week.  Practice (generally) takes 3 – 5 hours a week for an average student.  We’ve all seen what happened to Helen Keller in Miracle Worker, but I wonder if that’s how people sometimes view music teachers.  A teacher is a coach, not a miracle worker.  He can teach and troubleshoot, but he cannot infuse quality into bad playing.  That’s the “miracle” that happens when you put down your cell phone and practice.  J   Don’t ask for lessons if you don’t have time to practice regularly.  

 

I remember a girl in high school who played the trumpet in our band.  She knew that I played the flute, and one day she said to me, “I think the flute is nice.  I just want to play one song on it:  ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’.”  Here’s the deal:  Nobody starts with “The Flight of the Bumblebee.”  They start with “Merrily We Roll Along,” and then “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and then “Lightly Row,” and then, years after starting, they finally jump into “The Flight of the Bumblebee.”  Maybe.  (My dad is still waiting for me to get it done.)

                                                                                            

Put in the hours and take each step seriously.  If it’s worth playing, it’s worth practicing. 

 

3.  Use your gift to serve others.         

 

My brother has a chainsaw which he uses to cut wood to heat his home in the winter.  If we were to log (no pun intended) his hours of chopping and splitting all those cords of wood, it would be staggering.  Many of his “days off” have been spent (along with his wife and six children) working in anticipation of cold Pennsylvania winters. His chainsaw does not sit on the fireplace mantle in a glass case, to be admired by guests at dinner.  While we all enjoy watching the lumberjacks at the fair chopping up blocks of wood into kiddie chairs, a chainsaw is really designed to be a tool for serving others, many times at an exhausting expense.  And so is music. 

 

Children who have a musical gift need to be taught early to share their gift.  Sing at the nursing home.  Play a simple hymn for junior church.  Play your instrument for an offertory.  Kids who never play for anything except an annual recital do not show as much interest in music as children who use their music on a regular basis to serve others.  One of our favorite memories as a family is of Grandpa Valentin coming in the fall for his weekly visit.  When he unloads his van, we all watch to make sure he remembered to bring his guitar.  After our busy days, we all like to sit in the living room in the evening, sometimes reading, while he sings and plays old folk songs for hours.  Music is much, much more than trophies.  Children who have only played on platforms and in competitions have not experienced the real purpose of their music.  Find someone to bless. 

 

4.  Beware of pride. 

 

The middle letter of “pride” is “I.”  Human nature can be pretty ugly, without the Lord’s control.  Remember that the devil was a musician before he was cast out of heaven. 

 

One of the challenges gifted students will face is the tendency toward competition.  Part of this is imposed on them by well-meaning (or otherwise) adults who ask, “When will you learn to play as well as your sister?” or who say, “I bet you could win this year!  You are better than the rest of the kids!” 

 

I once had a conversation with the couple who had served as the youth directors for my husband’s youth group when he was a teenager.  I didn’t meet Jason until college, but their story about him didn’t surprise me at all.  Apparently their youth group once went to a conference where there would be a piano competition.  Before the competition began, a girl from another church was showing off on the piano in front of the other teenagers.  The boys in Jason’s youth group nudged him and said, “Go play your piece!  You are better!”  The youth director’s wife watched from behind the scenes to see what would happen, and she was encouraged when Jason just quietly shook his head and said, “No.”  He was better than the girl playing, and he wasn’t going to steal the piano and put her in her place. 

 

Pride is what takes God’s gift of music and turns it into a showpiece.  It takes songs that were written to praise God and focuses the attention back to people. 

 

Here are three little tips for helping to curb that ugly “spirit of competition” that wants to rise up in all of us: 

 

First:  Pray for the person who is targeted by your attitude of competition. Whether it’s the other pianist in your church, or that other contestant in a competition, pray for them.  Pray they will become a better musician than you are, and pray that God will give them opportunities to use their gift.  When God answers your prayer, He will be making better musicians of both of you. 

 

Second:  Ask the Lord to bring you into the company of better musicians.  One of the reasons some kids experience pride is that they have not been around many other musicians.  They have been heaped with praise and have not had to face anyone who could match their skill level.   To cease growing is to begin dying.  Being around others who are better than us helps us to find ways to improve. 

 

Third:  Learn how to respond Biblically to praise and criticism.  Find a nice way to answer someone who says, “That was just beautiful!  I don’t know how you play like that!”  How can we deflect the glory back to the Lord instead of absorbing it to ourselves?  How should we respond when we fail?  Even if we have done our best and practiced, the Lord may allow us to mess up in order to remind us that we need to depend on Him.  Be thankful for those lessons rather than resenting them.   If someone points out our mistakes, don’t kill the messenger, even if he seems picky.  What can we learn from people who point out our mistakes?  When someone says to me, “I think I heard a mistake . . .” I like to joke back, “Then you weren’t listening very well, because there was more than one!”  J 

 

**********************************************************************

 

Selfish people concern themselves with what we think of them.  Gracious people concern themselves with what we think of God.  In a world full of noise and harshness, music is a beautiful tool for turning eyes upward.  Most of us just need to get out of the way of our own song. 

 

 

 

“If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God;

if any man minister, let him do it as of the ability which God giveth;

that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ,

to whom be praise and dominion for ever and ever.  Amen.”   (I Peter 4:11)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greater than Shame

“Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith;

who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross,

despising the shame,

and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” 

Hebrews 12:2

 

Shame. 

 

It first shows up in Genesis 2:25.  Adam and Eve, prior to their fall, “were both naked . . .and were not ashamed.”  Half a chapter later, though, they took the forbidden fruit and immediately needed clothes to cover their shame.  Lacking understanding of what had really just taken place, Adam weakly admitted to God, “I was afraid because I was naked.” 

 

The image of Adam and Eve, crouched in brush, desperately trying to “sew” fig leaves together, weaving them with thorns and vines and whatever they could find, reminds us of our own hearts when we discover sin.  Shame brings misery, even in the middle of a perfect garden.  I wonder how many forces in history have been the result of shame—covering up sin, covering up damage, covering up human frailty, covering up weaknesses.   Six thousand years later, we continue to sew fig leaves.   

 

Shame is the pebble in our shoe that forces us to face our sin and prompts us to get right with God.  It’s the reminder, sometimes daily, that we are sinners, frail and needy, who can’t get very far without our Shepherd.  Shame protects us from further damage by producing inhibitions in our behavior that protect us from sinful scrutiny and evil.   We cover up and thereby prevent further shame. 

 

And Jesus despised His shame.

 

The word “despise” doesn’t mean what you think it means.  Our modern usage would make it synonymous with “hate.”  If someone “despises” cottage cheese, they really, really don’t like it.  If they despise me, I feel loathed. 

 

The Bible repeatedly uses the word “despise” to mean “to think little of.”   When we are told to “despise not” our mothers when they are old, it’s not asking us to stop hating them.  It’s telling us not to throw them, or their advice, away as the years take their toll.  Esau “despised” his birthright.  He didn’t hate it—he just thought nothing of it.  He could toss it aside for a bowl of stew.  Timothy was admonished to “let no man despise” his youth.  He was to “study to shew himself approved of God,” so that no one could dismiss him as “just a kid.”  Leaning hard on the authority of well-placed Scripture, he could stand tall and not be “thought little of.”  The Bible even makes a word play on this meaning when it says, “Despise not small things.”  In other words—“Don’t think little of little things.” 

 

At the cross, we see the juxtaposition of these two words:  Shame.  Despise. 

 

The awfulness of shame—the nakedness, the jeering, the robe being shredded into strips at the foot of the cross, a public execution, visible enough from the top of Mount Calvary to stop an entire city from its Passover preparation—and the triumph of despise—like Esau’s birthright, this horrible death becoming a small thing compared to the joy that was set before Jesus that day.

 

We often sing about what our salvation means to us, but we do well to consider what our salvation means to Jesus.   My redemption meant more to Jesus than the shame of the cross.   As awful and dark as that day was—enough to send fishermen into hiding and a Roman governor into frenzied hand-washing and armed guards to the tomb of a poor Carpenter—the suffering of the cross is a sub-theme of the real story.  The mission of the cross is about my salvation, and the love that drove that mission is so indescribable that it makes thorns and spears and nails seem small.

 

 

“Thanks be to God, for His unspeakable gift.”  II Corinthians 9:15

Plastic

A few weeks ago, I accidentally ended up with a different kind of dish soap than what I usually get.  I’m a big fan of Palmolive Original, with all those shiny bubbles and squeaky-clean rinse, but I ended up with this oily, “soft-hand”, flowery stuff.  Within a few days, everyone was complaining that our water tasted odd.  Kaitlyn finally realized our problem:  Our plastic drinking cups were absorbing the flavor of the flowery-scented dish soap.  Our water tasted like roses.  Ick.  

 

As Christians, we like to think that we are made of glass—or at least ceramic.  We don’t absorb; we deflect.  We rinse well.  Nothing sticks.  But the Bible says differently:  We are plastic—and over time, we humans absorb what we are exposed to, until eventually we are characterized by it. 

 

It is hypocritical to suggest that our lives are changed by a 30-minute sermon on Sunday, but not affected by 13 hours of television the rest of the week; that we are affected by 12 minutes of Bible reading in the morning, but not by 8 hours of country music for the rest of the day. 

 

God is the One Who created us to be “plastic.”  It is this quality that allows God’s Word to transform us through constant exposure.  It’s what allows parents to influence their children for God, and enables godly Christians to disciple new believers.  But in the wrong hands, our “plastic” nature can harm us.  God warns us of this characteristic by admonishing us to “make no friendship with an angry man, lest thou learn his ways.”  He reminds us that “evil communications corrupt good manners.”    

 

When the Allied forces stormed through Germany at the end of World War II and liberated concentration camps, their grisly discoveries shocked the world.  LIFE magazine photographers caught images that still make us shudder—living skeletons blanketed in prison garb, staring out from barracks.  Even General Eisenhower famously reacted upon his discovery of those awful camps and the real story of the Third Reich that had lain hidden under Hitler’s deceptions and his vigorous handshakes with cowards who had fallen under his spell. 

 

Yet, beyond the skeletons was a story of how real people learned how to live among monsters.  They came back from Warsaw, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruck with their stories of survival—how they sat on straw in the lice-ridden barracks of Auschwitz, exchanging detailed recipes and stories, and playing card games with pieces of rubbish they found.  Similarly, the POW’s of Vietnam came back home thirty years later, after severe torture and isolation, and told how they named ants and rats, how they played checkers with bits of gravel, and how they created intricate knocking codes that went undetected by the cruel captors who guarded their cells.  They adjusted.  In the face of horror, they eventually shed their shock and learned how to live among demons.

 

The coping mechanism that God created in us to help us survive life on this sinful planet is part of our “plastic,” our ability to stop being shocked at what we see so that we can proceed to make rational decisions that can save our lives. 

 

I remember one of our kids coming home one summer and telling me how an adult had shown “concern” that we homeschool our children.  This man told our daughter, “It’s too bad your parents have sheltered you so much, because someday you will really be shocked at what’s out in the world.”  

 

The Bible tells us that when Paul discovered an entire city given over to idolatry, “his spirit was stirred in him.”  (Acts 17:16).  When he discovered what was “out in the world,” he didn’t shrug his shoulders in wise, all-knowing indifference.  He was moved.   

 

I hope I never stop being stirred.  Numbness is a coping mechanism for those who are victimized, not a practice of those who are living in liberty.  Anesthesia is not a gift for healthy people.  The emaciated prisoners who stared back from bunkers, dull emptiness glazing over their eyes, were no longer shocked by murder, rape, torture, profanity, abuse, and starvation.  General Eisenhower was.  I’m with Ike. 

 

Desensitization tears down our inhibitions, making us more accommodating of sin.  It is a method used on kidnapping victims and prisoners of war.  It is what happened to the precious Indian girls who were sold into debauchery in Indian temples a hundred years ago.  The more we watch and listen to sin, the less we can be moved by it.  We cannot be used to sin and stirred by it at the same time. 

 

The Bible says that Lot—a “righteous” man, by the apostle Peter’s assessment—was “vexed” from living in Sodom.  His years of surviving in a world where wrong seemed right, where gross sin was glorified, took their toll.  And like my plastic drinking cups that now add a sickening floral scent to water, Lot’s life and family were eventually characterized by the sin that probably had shocked him at one time. 

 

We are commanded to be “simple concerning evil,” and not even to “ask of those things done . . . in secret.”   While God does not want us to be taken advantage of, we are not to make ourselves students of sin.  Anyone who has read the Bible in its entirely will not be surprised by what man can do.  The Book of Judges?   Enough said.  But only God is able to convey sin in a way that does not corrupt the reader. 

 

Our society is regularly plagued by people who admit to killing and attacking others because of the influence of violent video games.  Many studies have proven over and over again that those games make killing machines out of kids.  Yet, when was the last time you heard of someone who beat his brother to death because he read Genesis 4?  Likewise, God gives us a glimpse into the sins Pharaoh, Ahab, Judas Iscariot, Herod, and Jezebel without drawing us into their sin and thus making sinners of us.  The Bible can discreetly educate us on sin in ways that the world cannot. 

 

David wrote, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me.”  (Psalm 101:3).  When making entertainment and music choices, our question ought to be, “Do I want this to become a part of who I am?” 

 

We are plastic.  We will become what we listen to, read, and watch.   To choose what you allow into your mind is to choose who you will become.  Choose well. 

 

“That thou mayest walk in the way of good men,

and keep the paths of the righteous.”  (Proverbs 2:20)

Broken Pictures, Mended Hearts

I remember hearing a news report many years ago of a criminal on death row.  He had committed numerous unspeakable crimes, and the night before his execution, people carried signs of rejoicing outside the prison in celebration of his impending death.  That grim night, he received one phone call:  From his mother.  She called to say goodbye, and to tell him that she still loved him. 

 

I am not familiar enough with this man’s story to be able to say whether his mother was at all culpable in his demise, but her phone call makes a remarkable statement about motherhood:  If you sell yourself to work evil and to multiply tragedy to innocent victims; if you find yourself the most hated man in the world; and if righteous people must take the most drastic of measures to protect their society from you;  then be assured that in your darkest final hour, part of my heart will lie down and die beside you anyway.  Because I am your mother. 

 

Motherhood is an earthly picture of God’s great love for us.  Like the mother of a criminal on death row, making that last anguished phone call to the child she once held, God demonstrated His love to us in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” 

 

Mother’s Day is not just the story of how powerful a mother’s love is; this is the human picture of how much God loves us.  You want to measure God’s love?  You want to know what it means to be loved by someone who loves you even more than you could love yourself; for someone to feel your pain even more acutely than you can feel it yourself?  Here is your yardstick:  That’s what a mother does.  I am so blessed to have one of those spiritual “yardsticks,” a mother who prays for me, loves me, and has consistently demonstrated God’s love to me.  I never struggled to understand God’s love.  My picture is intact, and with each passing year I am more and more thankful for how well my sacrificial, godly mother has illustrated God’s love for me.    

 

But for some people, Mother’s Day is a painful reminder of what wasn’t.  The picture of God’s love has been marred by harsh treatment, abandonment, neglect, and absence.  Mother’s Day cards, with their sweet sentiments, sharply injure where hurtful words and selfish decisions have left gaping wounds.   The "natural affection" that God gave mothers, to protect us at all costs, has disappeared in some families.  The metaphor has been shattered. 

 

God once created an Old Testament metaphor for salvation.  As the Israelites traveled through the wilderness on their long journey to Canaan, God used a rock to illustrate Jesus Christ, the Rock of our salvation.  At first, Moses was instructed to strike the rock (which he did), and water gushed out.  Later, in Numbers 20, Moses was told to speak to the rock.  This time, though, Moses lost his temper with the people and struck the rock instead.  His disobedience totally disrupted God’s picture of salvation.  God was so displeased with the blasphemy that Moses lost his entrance into the Promised Land.  Yet, miraculously, water still came out of the rock.   Even when an earthly leader smashed God’s metaphor with an impulsive and fleshly snap-decision, God still met the needs of the people He loved. 

 

When human failure breaks down God’s picture, skip the metaphor and run straight to God.  David said, “When my mother and my father forsake me, the Lord will take me up.”  The God Who made water gush from a desert rock, despite the disastrous mistake of a frustrated leader, can work despite human failings.  He can meet your needs, even when the human hands He created for showing His love to you are sadly missing from the picture of your life.  For those of you whose mother was not there—let God fill in those places.  For those who struggle today with the scars of a dysfunctional home, remember that where your mother cannot understand you, accept you, forgive you, or love you with the unconditional love God meant to show you, that is the place where you go straight to the nail-prints and let those hands instead wrap around your hurt. 

 

God is big enough to make water rush from a rock, and He is big enough to be your “mother.”   Choose your focus wisely this Mother's Day.  Turn from your shattered human pictures and aim your eyes higher, to the One Who can mend your heart.  And remember:  "You are loved with an everlasting love."