Milk Without Cookies

I got a phone call today from a good friend who gave me very good news about someone who I thought hated me for telling her the truth. At first she hated me, and I couldn't handle it, so I ran away too. But it sounds like that truth is getting to her now, and she is opening her heart just a little.

When the Bible is said to be a double-edged sword, it sounds like the truth will attack you violently. In a way, it does. The truth of God is RADICAL, and can rock you to your core.

The cutting edge of His Word can be painful if you fight it, but I think that when you let it work, the Word cuts like a scalpel in the gentle hand of a surgeon, who leaves behind a scar to remind you of the cancer that once rotted your soul, and of the God who loves you and couldn't let you die.

This week's read has brought to my attention a new term. I am reading Wally Lamb's I Know This Much is True, which was another of Oprah's Book Club selections back in the nineties.

The lead character is one half of a pair of twins, Dominick Birdsey, and he has endured a fair share of pain in his lifetime:

Schizophrenic, delusional brother who dominiates the family attention, and Dominick feels obligated to care for him.

Daughter dies of crib death.

Abusive step-father, missing actual father, and dead mother.

Wife leaves after death of daughter.

Girlfriend cheats on him with her so-called "gay" friend (later revealed as her 1/2 uncle) and conceives a child with him too, but tries to convince the sterile Dominick that the baby is his.

So those are pretty much the highlights of Dominick's painful journey. It's not surprising that he's in therapy, and at one point his therapist calls him a curator in his own museum of pain, with monuments of righteous indignation.

What she means is that Dominick has made it his life's work to maintain the anger and bitterness that he feels in regard to his difficult life. Not only can he not let go of his "righteous indination," but he feeds his anger and resentment, cares for it like a fine piece of art.

This made me wonder about my own museum. Although I would like to consider myself a person who easily forgives, I definitely have a list in my mind of people who've wronged me, and I have built walls around myself so that these people can't hurt me again. When I'm really honest with myself, these people include people are I love very much, and that I want to be close to, but my righteous indignation keeps them at bay.

And then I got to thinking, that who among us truly has the right to be indignant? I think that none of us is truly innocent, as we have all fallen short and hurt SOMEONE at some point, even if we are innocent in certain situations. If anyone has a right to be righteously indignant, it is God, but he is always faithful to forgive us, and love us and pour his grace on us.

So maybe it's time I quit my job at the Museum and focus on eBay.

About a year and a half ago, Andrew and I said good-bye to a church that we'd been attending for about a year. We discovered some serious theological aberrations, though if we had been really honest with ourselves prior to the "discovery" it was something that had been niggling at us for awhile.

It was about 6 weeks before our baby was born, and we even had to cancel a baby shower that they had planned for us. We had hoped that maybe we could retain some of the friendships that we had formed there, and there were many intense friendships, but we later found that it was just too hard.

For one thing, we felt that they had deceived us, and not shared with us the whole truth about their belief system intentionally, and for another, the leadership style of this church is such that it is impossible to be connected to its members without being connected to the church itself.

Our close friends know that this turned our life upside down for a long time, and the fact that our baby was born during this difficult time of transition made it even more painful. But I'm not sure that anyone not directly connected can understand how it can still hurt so much.

Today while shopping, we nearly bumped into one of our former friends from the church, in fact she is the wife in the couple that was our most intimate friendship, our ex-best friends. And instead of saying hi, we avoided her and the beautiful child in her grocery card that we have never met. I'm nearly certain she saw us too. Of all our friends there, we tried longest and hardest with them, until Andrew and I realized that it really couldn't go anywhere. It just hurt too much.

And it hurts now, knowing that a person who I love so much is no longer a part of our life. In the car, I prayed for her and her family, that they could be loosed from the untruths upon which they have built their lives. And maybe, I finally know for sure that this is good-bye.