Living with Grace…and Knuckleheads
It is winter in Idaho, and I’m enjoying a week of skiing with my family after celebrating another joyous Christmas season. The air is cold and fresh, the sun is shining and I’m filled with joy as I carve turns and watch my young son, skiing in front of me, do the same. I’m smiling underneath my helmet and goggles when I feel a rush of air – a whoomp in my helmet that makes my eardrums flex like when you’re in a car on the highway and open just one window. A skier rockets past me and careens toward my unsuspecting boy. My heart is in my throat as I watch him barely make a small turn to avoid colliding at Mach 2 with my 11 year-old son. The skier lifts one leg off the snow and thrusts his poles out to maintain his balance as he shoots by, leaving my son tottering and flailing, shocked by the near miss with this human projectile. My son collapses in a heap on the snow and looks up the hill at me.
It’s then the rage comes. I feel it grow. My jaw tightens, grinding my teeth against one another with enough force to crush a diamond. My temples pound with blood and I literally see red as I scream at the top of my lungs: “ASSHOLE!”
The demon skier, as a result of his blinding speed, is now of course approximately 2.7 miles down the hill and can’t hear me. My son on the other hand, sitting in a heap at my feet and now covered head to toe in the snow I just plowed all over him in a rage-fueled kick stop, can hear me.
“Sorry, pal,” I say, trying to recover a shred of decorum. “That guy did a really horrible, galactically stupid, overwhelmingly moronic thing and it made me really mad.” The rage is building again even as I labor to calm down. My son, being infinitely more resilient than his hot-headed father, shrugs it off, pulls himself up and shooshes on down the hill, no worse for wear. I am left gritting my teeth, no doubt doing terrible things to my overworked temporomandibular joint, and fantasizing about the offending skier’s violent collision with a stationary object. My son is fine. The speed skier is fine. I alone am not fine. Only my moment of joy and happiness has been transformed to anger and hate. Hmmm…I think about this for a minute.
The truth is, I know this feeling all too well. It’s the same feeling that consumes me when a fellow motorist cuts me off, or runs a red light right in front of me. The same rage wells in my core when someone takes my parking spot, or cuts in line to get a table at a busy restaurant. In these moments, I want nothing more than for the God of the Old Testament to appear and adjudge these offending souls; to smite them with a fury that I imagine would warm the cockles of my heart. I recall a passage in 2 Chronicles where, for doing evil in the sight of the Lord, someone is stricken with a disease that makes his bowels fall out. That sounds like a perfect end for all of these people who cause me frustration or endanger my loved ones with their wildly irresponsible behavior. I laugh a little at this, imagining the conversation with my son as we ski on down the slope:
“What’s that mess Daddy?”
“Oh that?! Yeah don’t ski over that buddy. Remember that guy who almost hit you up there? Well, God made his bowels fall out! So, you know, he won’t be skiing like THAT anymore!”
But what strikes me is that God will not in fact smite these people – not just because I want them smited…or smote…or whatever. More than that, if I’m absorbing anything at all in church on Sundays, I am pretty sure that I am supposed to be instantly forgiving their maddening transgressions! But how? It seems so hard. Does living with grace mean that I can never be angry? Does following Jesus mean that I can’t be frustrated by people who do thoughtless, dangerous, petty things? That doesn’t seem right; it seems like an impossibly high bar. I’m just a dude, after all, not a saint! I’m not a Zen master or a Buddhist monk! How can I NOT be angry in these situations?
Perhaps I’m thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe it’s not that anger and frustration are not permitted, but that I need to do something before I get angry or frustrated. Is it possible that I am the one being selfish by condemning these people before I’ve considered the circumstances surrounding their various offenses against my good sensibilities? Maybe all I’m asked to do in these situations is to pause, to take a deep breath, and to consider them from a perspective other than my own before I invoke His divine wrath. I try this for a moment: I imagine that the speed skier whose bowels I wished onto the snow had just received a phone call. His wife was being rushed to the hospital to give birth to their first child and he was hurrying to the bottom of the mountain so he could get there and be with her. Suddenly, I feel not rage, but warmth at the thought of such a joyous prospective moment. I’m glad his haste didn’t in fact demolish my poor son, but I wish him Godspeed. Or perhaps the skier just learned his mother is very ill and needs him to be with her immediately for some reason. Again, not rage, but sympathy. I lost my mother. I know how bad that feels; how sad he must be if she is ill.
But wait a minute; in all likelihood, neither of these things are true. That skier was most likely just a knuckleheaded kid being a knucklehead. But there again, an insight. Have I never been a knucklehead? Have I never cut in line, or done something stupid, or thoughtless? Have I ever squeezed a little late through a yellow light? Surely there’s never been a case where I let a moment get the best of me and did something without calculating out fully the potential consequences of my actions? Of course, of course, a thousand times of course. I’ve done it all. And here’s the crusher: when I myself did these things, were the people around me feeling the same kind of rage and hate I just experienced, but directed at me? Surely not. They just don’t understand! I was in a hurry! I was just a kid! Don’t hate me!
When I think about it like this, I’m not angry at the young speed skier, I think he may be a kindred spirit. I don’t hate him; I want to find him, buy him a cup of coffee and talk to him about growing up and making good choices; tell him stories about some of the stupid things I did and what I learned. I’m sure he’d be sorry to know he missed this, but the point is that I want to talk to him the same way I talk to my sons, with patience and love and caring. If he’s only making the same mistakes I’ve made, doesn’t he deserve that from me?
So the wonderful, horrible conclusion is that after all that, in The Incident of the Speed Skier and the Man Who Would Have Him Disemboweled, I’m pretty sure that I was the a-hole; me, not him. I was the one who only considered my own perspective before I poured rage out onto this young man. I was the one who did not, in my mind, allow him to have – and maybe learn from – the same life experiences that teach us all. I was the one who lacked patience and empathy, who didn’t even try to understand before judging. And I was the only one whose day turned sour as a result. Only me. Oh my, the snippets from church that flood through my head as I think about this:
…for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
…and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
…let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Oh, this is embarrassing. How did I miss it?!
Perhaps living with grace doesn’t mean I can’t ever be angry or frustrated; maybe it just means taking the time to pause and think; to try to understand a perspective other than my own for a moment. Maybe all Jesus is asking is that I try to remember that it’s not all about me. It seems so simple, but I have this feeling that if I can just do that, I won’t in fact be angry and frustrated quite so often.