Happy Birthday to Me!

I was born into a family that had no idea how to relate. Love, if it was thought of at all, was believed to be expressed fully in the supply of material necessities and opportunities that prior generations had been denied. No blame, just observation. To what I learned from my childhood I added my own sins, and faithfully reproduced a dysfunctional brood of my own, who have since gone out into the world to wreak the next generation of fallout. God describes how the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those that hate Him, and my family is the poster child for this abiding truth.

And that, as they say, would be that. Except that somewhere in all this lostness, and for reasons known only to Him, God reached down from heaven in grace and mercy to pluck me out from the midst of the darkness by revealing His Son in me. Relatively late in life, the Hound of Heaven capped a lifetime of dragging with a final yank, so that the penny finally dropped and I became one of those who did not hate Him. And so, the unraveling of the darkness began.

One of the hard lessons for me to realize is that I cannot undo the bird’s nest of that my sin has made in my own life, let alone the effects that have been passed on to my children. It is a daily sadness that is only trumped by the hope that is in Christ. So there is prayer offered up for them and attempts to be a witness of the love Christ in front of them. We meet face to face infrequently. When we do, I see my dysfunctional self in their faces and their attitudes. Chips off the old block. It is an awkward dance for them. They have enough of a sense of duty to do family things out of guilt. But they don’t truly have the heart for it.

So when my birthday came a few weeks ago I was expecting either for it to be forgotten or for "duty" calls to be made in which platitudes were perfunctorily exchanged without any attempt at real communication. In anticipation of this I struggled with a building resentment. They were thoughtless, uncaring, preoccupied with self and ungrateful. They would forget. They didn’t care that I was alone and lonely. Meanwhile, I reflected that I had made serious and heartfelt efforts to reach out to my own father, who was still living – though in a far country.

And then, of course, the promptings of the Spirit brought words of Truth to my mind. I would have to forgive – and not through gritted teeth either. I already knew that. It had been a moment of weakness and self-pity. And so I began to gird up my spiritual loins, feeling quite good about my readiness to overlook anticipated offences. At least I was being obedient to God. What a set-up that was!

No sooner had I fallen into this self-righteous and judgmental frame than the Holy Spirit hit me smack between the eyes with the realization that whatever I received from my own children paled by comparison with what the Lord had received at my hand. There had been decades of ignoring Him to run around doing my own thing. There had been the presumptuous and light acceptance of His forbearance while I proceeded to make His name a byword among the heathen. There had been in that very same week my failure to run to Him eagerly in prayer, and to spend time in His presence talking and listening.

These were lessons I had been given many times before. He long ago showed me the principle that what I find most objectionable in others is the first thing I will see when I in honesty hold up the mirror to myself. But this time it went beyond an old lesson repeated. It went to the matter of relationship itself.

I started out by describing my relationally dysfunctional roots. I still have them. They affect my relationship with God. To me He is too often simply the remote supplier of necessities and opportunities that I lacked in my prior state. He is transcendent, stern, not really interested but doing things out of a self-imposed sense of duty. He is reluctant, unemotional, dictatorial and autocratic. He is, when all is said and done, personally inaccessible. None of this is true, of course – and my head understands this. My head knows that in Christ God is accessible with an intimacy that goes infinitely beyond anything the best of humanity can offer. I have just been slow to get out of the starting blocks. I believe that I am saved because God loved me from eternity with an everlasting love. But I have no real concept of the depth, the riches, the intimacy and even the ecstasy involved. God brings these things with Him, but I have, as yet, found little of it in myself, even though I know He is in me.

But in this latest episode, instead doing as I usually do and stoically dismissing the hurt that attends being ignored or marginalized by my children I was given permission to feel the hurt, yet without denying the need to hold a forgiving and loving heart towards them. Suddenly, a light went on. I saw the fact that God does indeed hurt. He feels. He has emotions. He is far greater than the one-dimensional, guarded, stuffed-shirt idol that I constructed in my imagination, but which is actually more a reflection of me than it is of Him.

Now I can begin to make sense of Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem, of His anger at hypocrisy, of His compassion towards the blind dumb meanderings of humanity as sheep without a shepherd. Now I have seen sorrow and compassion and forgiveness at work in me through faith and have been given a small insight into the mind of Christ. It is a mind discovered in suffering. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and in the midst of my own paltry suffering is the place where I can see Him best.

In a simple moment of clarity the whole Person of Christ came to bear. His life in me is manifested in the world whenever I obey the Word in the power of the Spirit. In that moment it is no longer I, but Christ living in me. And it is a complete Christ. Loving, emotional, compassionate – yet self-controlled, holy and a hater of sin.

Happy Birthday to me!