Permission Granted

Week of Monday, April 22, 2002

Have you ever felt like a candle flickering in the wind, somehow at the end of your resources? This week a friend shared with me that their spouse was having what might be a nervous breakdown—insomnia, sudden and uncontrollable crying, thoughts about going crazy, frightening feelings of being shaken to the core. As I thought about my friend's spouse, I thought about other friends and the very difficult situations that life has thrown at them in just the last few weeks: a child with severe panic attacks who required medical care, the death of a spouse after almost forty years of marriage, a grad student with depression, a teenager who has just entered drug rehab, and church acquaintances whose marriage has turned bitter and ballistic. My world is not that big, but even based on my limited experience it is easy to extrapolate and imagine the world of pain in which so many people live today, lives that feel very fragile indeed.

In the musical Les Miserables by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg, a factory worker, Fantine, has a secret illegitimate daughter, Cosette, and in order to care for her she sells herself as a prostitute. Fantine eventually dies in a hospital, but not before Jean Valjean promises to care for Cosette, and not before she sings of the bitterness that life has dealt her compared to the dreams of her youth (“I Dreamed a Dream”):

There was a time when men were kind.
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting.
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting.
There was a time.
Then it all went wrong.
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung
No wine untasted.
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame.
He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days
With endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came.
And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather...
I had a dream
My life would be
So different than this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
So life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Thank God that most of us do not live lives as desperate or dramatic as Fantine's (but more do than we would care to know or admit), but even so that does not mitigate the personal and private pain that many people experience. Like Fantine, even the apostle Paul suggests that sometimes it is life itself, not demons and death, that threatens to undo us (Romans 8:38).

What does the Gospel say to us when life slaps us around?

First of all, common sense alone might tell us that life can be difficult. If I remember correctly, the very first sentence of M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled says something like, “Life can be difficult, and the sooner we learn this the better.” I think that what Peck means is that many of us have unrealistically high expectations. To be sure, our modern western culture is a culture of entitlement (the obverse of which is our epidemic of victimization or the loss of entitlement). We all absorb this sense of entitlement from our culture, imagining that at the end of the day God longs for us to be wealthy, thin and tan.

Some Christians make things worse by insinuating that by becoming a Christian, or by living faithfully as a Christian, God will solve all of your problems. Scripture does not teach this, and life certainly does not either, but somehow the notion seems just too irresistible to relinquish.

As best as I can tell, in situations like these, the Gospel tells us two things.

First, God tenderly loves us with an unimaginable compassion. In one of the most intimate portrayals of God in all of Scripture, Isaiah chapters 40–44 speak of a God who loves Israel deeply, despite their (well-deserved) feelings of being deserted by Him. Our ways are not hidden from Him, writes Isaiah, even though we might feel like it. His understanding is inscrutable. He gives strength to the weary and tired, to those who stumble badly. We should not fear or be anxious, for He promises to uphold us. He comes to us and tells us, “I am the Lord your God, who upholds your right hand, Who says to you, ‘Do not fear, I will help you’” (Isaiah 41:13). According to Isaiah, “A bruised reed He will not break, and a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish” (Isaiah 42:3). Turning to the New Testament version of this same theme, Paul reminds us that there is nothing at all that can separate us from this tender love of God (Romans 8:31–39), for if God is for us, and He most certainly is, then nothing can, ultimately, be against us.

Practically-speaking, what this means is that God gives us permission to fail and to suffer, to struggle in darkness, to “stumble badly” as Isaiah puts it (Isaiah 40:30), and to do so knowing that citizenship in his kingdom is about unconditional love and not about a meritocracy. Maybe society, your parents, your employer, your church, or even your best (Christian) friends will not give you such permission to fail—with your kids, your finances, your health, your job, your spouse, and on and on. But God does, and in the midst of such trials He loves us more rather than less.

This is not a recipe to solve our every problem, but it is a recipe for hope that rejects the despair of Fantine. It is a hope, oddly enough, that emerges in the very midst of tribulations, says Paul: “and this hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:5).

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.