Innocuously Insidious

It seems innocuous enough, even laudably romantic, to say that despite others’ opinions, one sees glimpses of some greater beauty in another person. It would make (and probably has made) the skeleton plot of many movies… the person who is patient and suffers all sorts of abuse in the process of bringing out that greater character in the other. After all their hard work and persistence, their faith, hope, love, and an undying belief in never giving up, the other character’s true selves are able to flourish, and everything ends happily ever after.

Such stories make us sigh wistfully, echoing within us the hopes that perseverance pays off, that ugliness succumbs to beauty, that pain will be redeemed, and that love conquers all. Each of those things, in their purest forms, are true in their deepest sense and can be found at the core of our Christian story. Those things are true of our Father and displayed in his son. Even today, we catch reaffirmations of them through his spirit in our lives.

But I wonder what happens when each of those good truths are slightly distorted as we place ourselves at the center of those statements. We try to become the ones who redeem pain. We try to conquer all with our version of love. We want to be the ones to bring out the beauty in others, whether or not it is our rightful place to do so. All the while, we see the entire situation with our convoluted and cracked lenses. We tell ourselves that we are living the Gospel story, loving our neighbors as ourselves, when in fact it is our neediness, brokenness and emptiness that is trying to play God. We want to be the beneficiaries of our own “unconditional” love. We want to be the redeemers of our own pain that we created, and the one who plants, waters, grows and reaps seeds in the lives of others. It is not the Lord’s work in their lives that we are after, but *our* version of the Lord’s work according to *our* ideas of who we want them to be, which inevitably revolve around ourselves. It is our own corruption reading itself into a narrative that desires to be true.

So in the end, though it seems innocuous, we may be playing into the most insidious of sins by stringing together our distorted version of those truths. Namely, we cast ourselves as the role of God, even as we attempt to “love.” Sometime ago, in speaking of relationships, Bonhoeffer says that Christ must mediate our relationships. If Christ bids us to speak or act in love, we speak or act. If Christ bids us to stay silent and still, we rest and hold our tongues. If he calls us to greet and embrace, we do so in his name. But he may also call us to bid adieu and depart, and that too is in his name. Therefore, tenacity and persistence are only values so long as they are in Christ and his will. Love through actions is only God’s love so long as he calls for it. Since in him, there is a season for everything, and love in obedience, even if it is in silence, is far truer to his purposes than a seemingly innocuous romantic story.