Through a Glass Darkly

Today I’m working at home. It’s a crisp, cold February day, with a blue sky and bright Sun. I took my dog for a walk and it was wonderful. Just me and Patti, plodding along, with the wind in our faces and no one else in sight. Just perfect.

At first I had included this at the end of my prior post, but I felt like it should be separate. It’s difficult to “forget what is behind” when the things “behind” are lists of good things we’ve been involved in or done. It’s also hard, when we keep such lists, to forgot our inevitable failures. Sometimes there are failures that genuinely are “my fault.” I sinned. I didn’t step up to the plate. I lost it. Sometimes there are “failures” that are simply things that happened.

This week I received from one of my former law partners a copy of a judicial opinion concerning some people I had represented years ago in a bitter business dispute. The opinion was handed down in a recent case that was in some ways a continuation of the case I had handled four years ago. It’s fair to say that the nastiness and difficulty of that earlier case put me “over the edge” and led to some major changes in my life, including resigning my prestigious law partnership to take a teaching job. I’m very, very glad those changes happened — I love what I do now more than any other work I’ve done in my career — but for the past few years I’ve carried the baggage of that case. Could I have done something differently? Couldn’t I have resolved or won the case before it became such a problem?

Well, maybe. If you’re like me, you can pick apart anything you’ve done and find lots of flaws. But in this instance, it really wasn’t me. The judge in the opinion that my former partner sent me had some extraordinarly harsh words for the litigants’ conduct over the past five or six years. It was them all along. There’s nothing I could have done to salvage the disaster they had made for themselves.

Reading this judicial opinion, hearing this Judge criticize these individuals so harshly for their conduct for which they alone are responsible, felt like an enormous weight lifting from my soul. I think, I hope, I can now be free of that part of my past, and “press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” (Phil. 3:12.)

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:13-14).

I’ve always loved studying history. It was one of the few subjects to which I applied myself in high school (owing to a fantastic teacher, Miss Atkinson, who believed in me), and I majored in history in college. I would’ve become a historian if I hadn’t gone to law school. But this passage always bothered me, as I spent hours pouring over my history texts. What does it mean to “forget what is behind?”

This is my regular post for Every Square Inch. Our topic for discussion is “how do truth and love relate?” This led me to the famous passage on “love,” I Corinthians 13.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how love and truth relate in this passage. “Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” (I. Cor. 13:4-5.) Doesn’t this tell us to ingore the truth sometimes for the sake of love? I can think of many wrongs that have been done to me over the years, often by friends and family, some of which continue to have lasting consequences. In a few cases, the perpetrator has never acknowledged the harm he or she did. The “truth” is that there is, in a sense, a “record” of these wrongs written into my life, whether I like it or not. Anyone who has lived more than a few years in this broken world could say the same.

So if love compels me to release the anger caused by these wounds, to purge the record, isn’t that the same as denying the truth?

Last week we visited the neurologist with my youngest son. He is four years old, vivacious, smart and generally healthy, but he does not really talk. He mostly babbles and communicates with gestures. he has a history of nocturnal seizures, which had been under control but which recurred over the holidays. There is (thankfully) no apparent physical cause (such as a brain abnormality) for these problems.

It was an extraordinarily frustrating visit with the neurologist because she told us nothing new. The school where my son gets speech therapy had been “holding off” on a broader treatment plan until the neurological visit. The neurologist, however, seemed surprised by this, and bounced us back to the school. I know these people are trying to do their jobs as best they can, but meanwhile my precious little boy is not learning how to overcome his speech disability, and we are not being trained how to help him. Days, months and seasons go by with no firm diagnosis and nothing for us to hook into.

We need patience and support. There’s nothing more I would want than for my little boy to be healed. If that’s not God’s will, I want to do everything I can to help him become the person God wants him to be. If he is disabled his whole life, he is no less precious as a person. The hardest thing isn’t the shock that everything isn’t “perfect.” It’s the waiting for some concrete understanding of the “imperfection.”

Before I start to sound like I’m crying in my milk, let me say that I’m deeply thankful for my little boy and for all the other blessings I’ve received. Even when I despair that he’ll never learn to speak, or when I give in to the “big black dog” worries about deeper undiagnosed problems with his health, I’m grateful that God entrusted him to my wife and I, just as he is. There is so much pain in this world and so many people I know who have dealt with more immediate and severe losses, such as cancers and tragic fatal accidents. God is good; all His purposes are good; all His ways are good; and everything in this short life of mine is His, until we rejoice together in that better country He is preparing.