The Blame Game

About 6 weeks ago, I started to take supper to my shut-ins a few times a week.  Sometimes, the kids like to accompany me to get out of being "shut-in" themselves.  (This winter weather is driving us all to the brink of madness.)  Yesterday, as Levi and I were driving to drop off a meal to my "sick people" as Levi calls them, the front passenger tire of our van got pulled into one of the many ruts on our soft, country road.  It pulled the whole van to the right, and Levi was uneasy about it.  He said, "Mom, you're driving crazy."
I said, "Sorry, buddy, but the road is kind of soft."  He replied, "It's okay.  It's probably just the van's fault."
I guess you know you're blood-relatives when a person is willing to blame an inanimate object for you.

As a divorced person married to a divorced person, my life has been filled with a veritable plethora of awkward circumstances.  From hosting my husband's ex-wife in our last home and in our current home, to inadvertently washing her underwear... yes, I said, "washing her underwear", to coping with children's programs with my ex-husband and his wife, to hosting my ex-husband's wife's parents at our home last week and introducing them to my other children as Sadie's and Claire's "grandma and grandpa".  I say that I cope with all these things, only because my husband doesn't seem to mind a whole lot of these inconvenient goings on.  That is to say, until his ex-wife's last visit ended in her walking unannounced into our bedroom and seeing him sitting on my adorable, white, cushioned, Victorian, vanity bench lifting my 5 pound dumbbells.  I missed it, and when I say, "I missed it," I mean I really would have liked to have witnessed that.  I'm sure it was precious.

Not to diminish Mark's hospitality in bizarre situations...  He is way better than I am.  He doesn't get annoyed, flustered, or exasperated like I do.  It's moments like these when I feel sorry for myself and find myself wanting someone to blame for my circumstances.  Isn't it someone else's fault that I have to continue to graciously endure the people who have been the cause of much of the pain in our lives?  I mean, we obviously have a choice as to whether or not to let these people invite themselves into our home.  It's probably not even good "boundary setting" to let them into our family home.  We certainly don't allow it for their sakes.  We do it for our children - who are much better at unconditional love than we could ever be, and what's important to them is important to us.

Blame shifting comes naturally to humans.  Shifting responsibility to another person (or even an animal or inanimate object) seems like second nature when we face consequences that are even just the least bit unpleasant.  And why not?  We've been doing it since Genesis 3:11.


"Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"
 ¹²The man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate."
 ¹³Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" And the woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

I don't know about you, but I see three shifts of blame in Genesis 3:11-13.  The first two are from Adam to "the woman You gave to be with me."  In other words, it was God's fault for giving Adam "this woman," and/or Eve's fault for giving him the fruit.  The third blame shift is in verse 13 when Eve says, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."  Adam and Eve covered the aggregate of human propensity to blame.  First, it was another person's fault - Eve's.  Then very quickly, in the same sentence even, it was God's fault.  Third, it was the serpent or devil's fault.  She made me do it.  God made me do it.  The devil made me do it.  The people He had created for fellowship - companionship even - abandoned Him: left Him alone, holding the bag (blame).

God saw our very first sin - not trusting that He had our best interest at heart and thereafter choosing a way we thought was better.  Even worse, we were not willing to even acknowledge what we had done to Him.  To our amazement, His redemption of us flies in the face of the justice we deserved.  By glorious contrast to our blame-shifting human nature, Jesus came for the sole purpose of taking our blame on Himself and not just our blame, but our punishment for that blame.  Isaiah 53:3-5 tells of this work:

³ He was despised and rejected by men,
      A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
      And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
      He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
       ⁴ Surely He has borne our griefs
      And carried our sorrows;
      Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
      Smitten by God, and afflicted.
       ⁵ But He was wounded for our transgressions,
      He was bruised for our iniquities;
      The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
      And by His stripes we are healed. 

We hid... our faces from Him in the Garden of Eden.  We abandoned Him in our selfish desires.  Matthew 26:40-45 details the disciples falling asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane before Jesus died.  He asked them to stay awake and pray.  He was experiencing those very human emotions of sorrow and fear, but they were tired.  Matthew 26:55b says simply, "Then all the disciples forsook Him and fled." Again in Matthew 26:69-74, Peter denied even knowing Jesus - not once, but three times.  At a time when Jesus was counting on their companionship, humanity again left Him alone - holding the bag.  We hid... our faces from Him in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Not only did we not recognize His heart beating for (toward) us, we didn't care... even when it stopped beating for (in order to save) us.

How many times are our eyes to heavy to companion our Lord?  How often are our feet too quick to abandon Him in front of others?  Why do we still hide our faces from Him?  Jesus died to purchase the right for us to look God in His glorious face again.  He bought back the opportunity for us to be His companions.  It was so costly.  He took my blame so that I don't have to shift blame - not to favorite television shows, nor to sleepy eyes, nor to busy days.  The ultimate irony is a thing of beauty.

To Know Me Is to Love Me?

I had my first kiss today. It was kind of unexpected, but I think that made it more special. I've been seeing him for a couple months now, and I finally got up the courage to hug him today. He was adorable, and he must have decided to kiss me on a whim because, with tears in his eyes, he hugged me back and kissed me - right on the cheek. I have to admit I glowed for a few minutes after. Maybe you're starting to wonder (especially since I have a husband and five children) if they have possibly finally driven me to the brink of insanity. It was my first Hospice kiss. He's 92, and I'm 32, and I'm pretty sure that the age difference is totally appropriate in this situation and didn't matter a bit to either of us. It's strange how unsure I feel of myself in new situations. I spend my life in a daily grind. Not that it never offers variety or a different set of challenges, but it rarely offers the opportunity to doubt myself. Hospice, on the other hand, has already put me in situations with many different types of people with whom I had relatively little in common. I've had to figure out how to get to know them, relate to them, help them, and even love them... but not too much.

Getting to know people is a tricky business. It's a necessity that many of us find easier to avoid. The farther along we get into technology, the more likely some of us are to retreat into a faceless void. Relationships often begin with this shiny facade called the "first impression". From that point, we try our best to keep up this facade. However, the farther we get into actually knowing others, the harder it is to keep a relationship neat and tidy. The more work a relationship takes, the less likely we are to try to maintain it... especially if we already have one or more satisfactory relationships with other people.

In a family, you can't help but get to know people down deep. I know my kids... good, bad, and ugly, and they know me the same way. Even the things I think I can hide from them, maybe even especially those things, are the things they seem to detect easily. The older three like to catch me in error. I am famous for a few things in our house. One of them is that I often absentmindedly answer questions to which I didn't listen, call the children by a sibling's (or pet's) name, and mix words together when I talk. Writing is a better medium for me. I have time to think through what I say. Maybe that's why I like it so much. My kids, like me, have a critical eye... which pays me back for my own. For example, a few weeks ago, Austin noticed that a new power line had been placed across the river on the way to my mom's house. As he mentioned it, I meant to say either, "I knew they had been working on it," or "I noticed they had been working on it." What I actually said was, "I knew-ticed they had been working on it." Well, when you make up a hybrid word like "knew-ticed", your 8th grade son is the first to start giggling (because it bears an uncanny resemblance to the word "nudist"). I've learned that there is no way to gloss over it, pretend it didn't happen, or try to keep from a full acknowledgement of the ridiculousness of what I had just said. We just laughed and joked about it, and he asked me not to say it in front of his friends.... which made me laugh harder that he thought I would want to say that in front of his friends... and as I tried to picture a context in which I would possibly start blurting things turrets-style in front of his friends.

Speaking of teenaged embarrassment... it seems to know no end. As my younger 4 children sang in front of the church on Sunday with a group of other small children, Levi, our 3 year old, became so excited to be up in front of a crowd with the whole church's attention, he had to use the opportunity to blurt. He blurted uncontrollable, unintelligible gibberish between the second and third song to a point that it became impossible to get the other children and the audience to stop laughing at him long enough to get him to stop blurting so that they could start the last song. After they finally ended the last song, Levi ran down the center aisle(gushing loudly more gibberish), realized we were seated on the side aisle, turned around, ran back up the center aisle, across the front of the church, and back down the side aisle to our seat - to the resounding chuckle of half the church. Austin was completely mortified and kept his head down repeating, "I'm not related to that kid in any way." He can't keep from knowing his brother, as much as he sometimes wishes he could.

All this talk about being associated with or not associated with (knowing or not knowing) certain people makes me think about a passage of the Bible that sometimes perplexes me.

In Matthew 7:21-23, Jesus says, ²¹"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²²"Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' ²³"And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.'"

In this passage Jesus tells us that, in the end, not everyone who thinks they know Him will enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, people who have "prophesied, cast out demons, and performed miracles", all in the name of Jesus, are told by Him that He never even knew them.

The obvious question for me has always been, "God knows each of us intimately - completely (Psalm 44:21, Jeremiah 17:10, Psalm 139:1-4, 2 Kings 19:27, Job 11:11). He created us, after all, so what does Jesus mean by, "I never knew you..."? How can He know us and yet not know us?

Last week, I ended up reading in 1 Corinthians 8. "1a "...we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. ²If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; ³but if anyone loves God, he is known by Him." In context, Paul is talking to the Corinthians about an argument they were having with one another over whether or not to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Some were saying it was fine, and others were saying it was wrong. Paul started out by saying that the most important thing was whether or not they considered themselves as more knowledgeable than those with whom they were arguing. Obviously, there was some pride going on, and he was trying to let them know that, more important than the physical issue of eating or not eating meat sacrificed to idols, was the issue of building one another up by loving each other instead of trying to use intellect as a weapon against another Christian. They were using worldly "knowledge", in arrogance, to act superior. Paul goes on to say in verse 2 that even the fact that a person thinks he has knowledge is the first sign that he doesn't know enough to know that he doesn't know anything. The best part about this passage for me was verse 3. Paul states very simply, "But if anyone loves God, he is known by Him."

I found this to answer the question I had about Jesus sending away the "Christians" in Matthew 7:23. If we love God, then we are known by Him. I might define love as a choice to act in the best interest of another without regard to self, but it's not just that simple. You could do those things without truly knowing another's heart. Love also involves sitting quietly, communing wholly, and imbibing deeply of another. It assigns intrinsic and undeniable worth to another. Luke 10:38-42 describes two sisters - one who was doing for Jesus and one who was drinking in Jesus. Jesus told them that he preferred the actions of the latter. Ideally, acting in love toward God proceeds from a trust/belief that God's Word is true in that He "first loved us" (1 John 4:19). "Doing for" doesn't always equate to loving. Sometimes it just equates to trying to earn love... which, in the end, isn't loving the other person at all. Instead, it equates to loving self enough to try to gain the love that self wants and "deserves". "Drinking in", on the other hand, is an unselfish interest in knowing another person deeply. I think that both doing for and drinking in are essential parts of knowing and loving. In human terms, knowing someone completely can be scary. In my experience, finding out too much about a person many times makes that person less desirable, less lovable. That's where the phrase, "too much information" originated - in the thought that if I know too much about you, it will disgust me. I imagine if I knew every, little thought and detail about those around me and they knew the same about me, we would not be capable of loving one another at all. 1 Corinthians 8:3 makes it clear that God knows those who love Him. He chooses to know me and love me despite knowing all of me - good, bad, and ugly. A sweeter, more pure, more desirable love, we could not possibly know.