12:25pm, January 15, 2012. The Bamba Centre, Tete, Mozambique.
Greetings from sunny, humid Tete! I arrived back in town on Friday evening, after another long and relatively productive week in Beira, and it feels surprisingly good to be home. It’s funny how familiarity produces its own sort of comfort, and how much this place has grown on me in the past years.
Cheng, my Zimbabwean roommate and brother, told me a story the other night that I can’t get out of my mind, and I wanted to share that with you this afternoon.
Rosa, Cheng’s older sister, lives about a mile away from us, and apparently Cheng spent a lot of time at her place over the holidays. Rosa and her husband take care of several children, including two young cousins who they’ve effectively adopted, and about a week ago Rosa sent the two boys to sell some chickens at a neighborhood market. It’s fairly common for folks here to raise poultry at home, and to sell the birds when some extra income is needed.
The cousins took the birds to the market, sold them, and began to walk back home. After a few minutes they were stopped by a stranger, who claimed to be a friend of Rosa’s family, and he asked where they had been. The older of the boys innocently explained their errand, revealing that they were returning home with the money, and the man ended up tricking them and stealing the cash.
Rosa is a fairly stern woman, and the boys were terrified at the thought of what she would do if she found out what had happened, so the older one came up with a plan. The two of them ripped up their pants and shirts, rubbed dirt in their hair, and stomped down the grass in an area along the path. They returned to the house in tears, the older one with a noticeable limp, and proclaimed that they had been beaten up and robbed.
Cheng, who’s quite good at reading people (and who was once a young boy, himself), apparently suspected that something wasn’t quite right, and he asked the boys to take him back to the scene of the crime. Upon arriving at the place with the disturbed grass, which they made sure to point out, Cheng asked each brother individually to tell his version of the story.
As you might imagine, the detailed accounts of the fictitious robbery didn’t line up very well, and eventually the boys confessed their lie and in tears (real this time) explained what had actually happened. The three of them walked back home together, and Cheng took Rosa aside to tell her about the boys’ confession. She was angry, understandably, and asked Cheng for his advice. My roommate suggested that the cousins had probably already suffered enough for their naivety and dishonesty, and had learned their lesson, so more punishment wouldn’t have much benefit.
The two boys were visibly frightened as Rosa approached them, and miserable in their guilt at losing the money and lying to cover it up. Rosa took a long look at them, smiled, and said some of the most powerful words I can imagine.
“It’s over, boys. It’s finished. You can stop walking with your limp now.”
Man. I love that.
The story is significant to me for a few reasons. First, I know, deeply, what those boys were feeling. I’ve made big mistakes before, lied about them, and felt the hellish vice grips of guilt and fear clamping down on my heart. I know the surging waves of panic that rise at the anticipation of inevitable consequences, and the even more horrible prospect of carrying around the ever-growing weight of a lie. Ugh. My body is tense just thinking about that.
Second, and more significantly, the story is poignant to me because I see Jesus’ fingerprints all over it. Complete forgiveness of sin, and the epic finality and explosive sigh of release that accompanies it, is perhaps the most significant experience available to human beings. Those of you who have heard Rosa’s words from another person know their power in completely changing a broken situation, and those who have heard them from the Perfect, Holy God of the Universe know their power in completely changing…everything.
“It’s over, boys. It’s finished.”
Cheng finished the narrative with a humorous epilogue, and it was only afterwards that I also began to consider its profundity.
After the boys had changed their clothes and washed up, the older cousin returned to the main room, still limping. The whole family burst out laughing, and someone repeated Rosa’s earlier words: “You don’t have to limp anymore!” Apparently the child had subconsciously maintained his act, perhaps forgetting that it was no longer necessary.
It was pretty late by the time Cheng finished his story, and as I lay in my customary feet-sticking-six-inches-off-the-end-of-the-bed, mosquito-net-wrapped-around-my-face sleeping position, I thought about how well the story’s end represents my own story.
I spent most of my high school years battling an addiction. The details of that time are probably irrelevant to this post, but suffice it to say that the addiction was unhealthy and destructive, and, like many addicts, I felt caught in a perpetual tug-of-war between a profound self-loathing and the special allowances I continued to make to maintain my own brokenness. Maybe some of you have been through that, too, or are even now feeling the pulls from both directions.
I sometimes wonder whether most Christians might actually find themselves in a similar place from time to time. Most folks probably don’t like to think about their junk in terms of addiction, I’d guess, but most of us, deep down, are fully aware of broken or unhealthy stuff in our lives that we just don’t want to get rid of. The reasons for doing so are plentiful – maybe our junk makes us feel sexy, or powerful, or calm, or secure, or even righteous – but whatever the motivation, we keep going back to our sin like a dog to its vomit, and it feels…normal.
The problem with many of our beliefs and assumptions about addiction, though, and about sin in general, is that they’re wrong. Ha. Statements like “once an addict, always an addict” and identities like “sinner, saved by grace”, as commonplace as they are, simply aren’t true.
For those of us who have decided to follow Jesus and accept the complete, absolute, ridiculous forgiveness he offers, and have received his Spirit in our lives, there’s absolutely no need to keep living in our unhealthy patterns. To do so is ludicrous, actually – just as ludicrous as the older brother’s ongoing limp. More than that, though, it’s detrimental to life; just as limps take the joy out of walking and dancing, ongoing sin sucks the joy out of being in relationship with God and other people.
Those of you who read the Bible are likely familiar with Paul, and for those who don’t, all you really need to know is that he was a brilliant, Jesus-loving Jew who helped groups of confused Christians navigate the decades following Jesus’ death and resurrection, primarily through a series of letters sent to believers in different geographic regions.
Paul talked about this limp idea in a few places, but his letter to the Romans is especially interesting. Check out this passage, from Chapter 6, with my own italics added:
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin – because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus […] for sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.”
I think that Cheng’s story captured an important paradigm shift that I first glimpsed during my senior year in high school, and which I still sometimes struggle to fully believe.
I used to interpret Paul’s words here and elsewhere as saying something to the effect of “Look, you ingrate, God did an amazingly merciful thing in forgiving you, so you should stop messing up and show some respect. You really should have had yourself together by now, you know.”
That might sound sort of silly, but I’m not convinced that it isn’t a message taught in many churches today, and that I’m the only one who sometimes suspects that God is angry or frustrated with me when I make the same stupid choice…again.
Without trying to be overdramatic, I think that any theology that depicts God as an exasperated cop comes straight from the pit of hell. Seriously. I think that God is probably much more like Rosa’s character in the story – He knows that our limps are both detrimental to the quality of our lives and completely unnecessary, so He looks at us with love in His eyes, repeatedly telling us that we’re free, and that we really don’t need to limp anymore.
Now, please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here – the limp analogy has its limits, admittedly, and I don’t think that God and the angels sit around and laugh merrily at our foolishness every time we walk into a room and do something dumb. Real life limps are destructive, and no good dad laughs when his kid trips and falls. That said, though, it seems absurd to imagine the family in the story getting angry at the older boy’s continued limp, because it no longer had any connection to his current standing in those relationships. Instead of frustration at his limp, I can imagine Rosa feeling compassion, or maybe saying something like “Honey, I already forgave you, remember? This isn’t necessary anymore; it’s not who you really are. Go run and enjoy being a kid again!”
The lies that have shaped our identity – those that tell us that we have to get drunk to have fun, to sleep around to experience intimacy, to gossip to feel like we belong, to buy a big house to be successful – are just that: lies. The King of the Universe LOVES us, man, and the joy and intimacy He offers us, and the worth and identity and success we’ve inherited simply by being His kids, are already realities in our lives. We’re not sinners, we’re saints, period. Let’s believe it, run with it, dance with it, and suck in the fresh air of freedom.
“It’s over, boys. It’s finished. You can stop walking with your limp now.” Amen, sister.
