Merry Christmas. I have a rather unusual Christmas Reflection to share this year. I am fortunate enough to be in a discussion group where we enjoy circulating a single book, highlighting passages in our assigned color, and using sticky notes to add personal thoughts and anecdotes. After we have all read the book, we get together to discuss it's themes.
We recently read, highlighted, and discussed the insights from Kahlil Gibran's 1923 The Prophet. As part of my contribution to the group discussion I allowed the coterie to read my Day #4100 Reflection (Planks). One of the sticky note commentaries I received back was, "You disappointed me before I ever knew you!" This turn of phrase hit me like a ton of bricks. It crushed and convicted me. The commentator pointed out that, if, while at the fair, instead of watching the tweaking and twitching sideshow freaks from a distance and sanctimoniously snickering, I had offered them a turkey leg or corn dog instead, I could have had a singular impact that created a ripple that may have positively changed a life or a family. He went on to share an anecdote from seventeen+ years ago, around 2006, when, in his young twenties, there was yet another of a hundred of missed opportunities for someone to have changed his life. He had just served his first stint in prison, two years in a minimum facility, and he had returned to the former people and places that were the stomping grounds of his tumultuous teenage years. He was living back at the same apartments, running around the same woods, swimming in the same lake, and involved in the same debauchery. He was selling recently stolen property from a church to fuel his alcoholism and addictions. He was coming off of a weeklong bender where he couch surfed, was not eating, and was dodging the sheriff. Nobody in his family seemed to care where he was, if he was alive, and much less if he was hungry. In retrospect, everyone around him was in the same homeless, hopeless, and inebriated state. There was no room at the inn and the cupboard was bare. He was so hungry that he decided to go fishing. He walked down to the community's enclosed dock and managed to cobble together a rod to fish with. He was having a very difficult go at it. However, an older couple at the dock were pulling up crappie after crappie after crappie. They thought their fish too small and kept throwing them back despite his pleas to allow him to have them. Despite using the same color jig as them, and only fishing a few feet away, he was not having any luck. With each passing moment he was slowly beginning to despise them. Eventually the older couple left the dock. He managed to snag a carp, but it broke his only line and swam away with his only lure. Not only did his filament give way, but something deep inside of him snapped as well. The couple soon returned to the dock with their lunch. They continued to fish and eat and enjoy themselves. Ignoring his emaciation and desperation, they ignored him. They continued to eat all the while tossing their fish back into the lake. He recognized the couple as people who lived close by. Too proud to beg for their scraps, he approached the couple and asked if there was any yard work that he could do in return for some food. They feigned disinterest and returned to their meal. He was so hungry. The more they ate and laughed and reveled the more he loathed them. His hunger and his loathing quickly transformed into hate. In his desperation he decided he would kill them, take their food, steal their car, and drive as far away from his misery as whatever gasoline was in their tank would take him.He walked outside of the dock to look for a weapon: an oar, a mechanics tool, a paddle, a log. He paused for a moment, grabbed the railing encircling the dock, and steadied himself. With tear filled eyes he stared out over the choppy waters, conflicted about the plan he was contemplating. He cried out to the universe, to any god or goddess, or other paragon for help. In rueful silence he wondered, "How had his life turned into this?" In the deep recesses of his mind he began to piece together the Lord's prayer he learned from the few times he went to AA and church with his grandmother.
At that very same moment a true hero, a man he didn't know he didn't know, intervened. Around him an unseen war was raging. Just beyond the veil demonic forces and angelic warriors were fighting toe to toe over the soul of this man who felt himself lost forever to time and circumstances.
He eventually came out of his transfixed state overlooking the the lake. He was fully resolved to do whatever it took to steal the old couples food and flee his surroundings in their stolen vehicle. When he determined the time was right to attack the man and woman were gone. They were nowhere to be seen. He had lost track of the time that had passed while transfixed by the water and he was unaware of their leaving.
Bewildered by disappearance of the old man and woman he walked around the dock. He was desperate. He was in physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pain. In his stupor he came across a bucket of minnows that had not been there earlier in the day. He gorged himself.
Before you get your hackles up my dear Christian reader, wondering how this is possibly a Christmas story or why in the world I would befriend a man with such wickedness in his heart, let me remind you of THE man after God's own heart: King David. In 1 Samuel 25 we read a narrative of the soon-to-be future king couch surfing in the country, hiding out from the law, and starving. When he asks the extremely well off Nabal for some food, Nabal refuses. David's immediate response is to kill the man. He begins to formulate a plan. At the moment he heads out to commit his murderous scheme there is a holy intervention. David eventually acquiesces and declares that it was the Lord God who kept him from bloodshed and vengeance.
Thank the Lord God that His angelic emissaries and the Holy Spirit intervened and evil was thwarted that day: for David and for my fellow incarcerate. When I shared with my fellow incarcerate the account of David and Nabal he was dumbfounded that THE man after God's own heart had such a similar story as his. Years later David's own son, King Solomon, wrote in Ecclesiastes there really is nothing new under the sun. All of our stories are just variations on the same few themes.
"You disappointed me before I ever knew you!" I think that this commentary, lifted from our discussion of Gibran's The Prophet, hurt so much because it is reminiscent of Matthew 7:23 where Jesus is admonishing those whom do not actively live out their faith: "I never knew you."
The young father in our make shift book club that recounted this testimony (he is the same age as my little brother, just 8 years older than my son), had a hard time sharing his story as it is so far removed from whom he is today and whom he wants to be in the future. But it happened, and the memory and the shame still lingers. Who would I be to judge him for who he was? Gibran wrote, "What judgement pronounce you upon him though honest in the flesh yet is a thief in spirit? What penalty lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit? And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor? Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged? And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds? Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law which you would fain serve?"
In the discipling relationship this book club commentator and I are forging, in the friendship we are building, I represent every middle class paradigm that he desperately wanted to grow up in, every well-off-enough person he has ever thought he knew, and eventually every neglectful civil servant he ever blamed for not rescuing him. I represent every religious, educated, and financially stable person who ever let him down by not acknowledging his pain filled circumstances, who fueled his addictions, who used and abused him, who ignored him, who sanctimoniously snickered, and who did not offer to share a morsel of their food.
As I reflect on his testimony I am left wondering how many other people I have disappointed whom do not even know me yet? Whose path have I crossed and failed to fulfill the possible destiny the Lord had intended for me to fulfill in our crossing? How many times have this young man and I crossed paths prior to our meeting at Jess Dunn and I did not step up? Will we get to Heaven and watch the game tape only to discover we crossed paths multiple times in this life? Was it him at the fair that I silently displayed my isms towards? Or maybe we crossed paths one summer while visiting the antique/junk stores in Grove, or at a BSA camporee, or at Mayfest, or watching fireworks on the Arkansas River's West Bank? Maybe he crossed paths with my brothers as they worked midnights on the West Side of Tulsa or secured the pods at DLMoss? I would bet my father processed his latent prints. He swears it was my daughter who served him food at Loaves and Fishes in 2015. Maybe my brother and parents unknowingly currently interact with his family in Grove.
Before I get too hard on myself I have to be balanced in my self reflection. It is possible we served him a meal at Iron Gate or handed him a Burger Under the Bridge. Maybe he received one of the Walmart gift cards we taught our children to hand out each Christmas as folks shopped for their holiday food items. Maybe he was a recipient of one of the FCS diaper drives we did at Garnett. Maybe we have been traveling in slightly adjacent circles for some time without knowing it. Gibran reflects that, "You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together. The roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all are entwined together in the silent heart of the earth."
"You disappointed me before I ever knew you." Ouch! I wonder, who am I disappointing today? What actions, or inactions, am I involved in now that are disappointing a currently unknown someone from my future? What unknown someone is disappointing me right now, through their action and inactions, that I will not know about for years to come, if ever. Today, who is someone I have never met whom, through their actions or inactions, is keeping me behind these fences? Today, what unknown stranger, someone I have never met, whom through their actions or inactions, is going to free me from these fences?
One cold December day, when Jesus was already about nine months old, there was a knock at the door of the home Joseph had secured for his new family. A cadre of unknown strangers, Persian astronomers, showed up with expensive and lavish gifts of gold, frankensence, and myrrh. My Christmas wish for you dear reader is that you, like these unknown wisemen, will take the time and the effort to step out of your comfort zone and offer a blessing, a gift, this holiday season to someone in spiritual, mental, or emotional pain: a turkey leg or a corn dog or a fish or some yard work. In doing so you may not only be impacting a single life, but an entire family, as well as the generations to follow. Do not be like the ungrateful and stingy Nabal whom the Lord struck down because he was not sagacious enough to share his blessings.
Do not withhold a blessing, a nod of acknowledgment, a kind smile, or a listening ear of empathy if it is within your power to do so. Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet "there are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward. And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism. And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindless virtue They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space. Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth."
THE PROPHET whose birth is celebrated around the world today, is quoted in Romans 8:29 as proclaiming "for whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son." This Christmas may you find your character, your conduct, and you conversations conformed into whom THE PROPHET knew you to be when he formed you in the womb (Jeremiah 1:15). May no one ever be able to say about you, "You disappointed me before I ever knew you."
