RootsRain

I’ve had a very full weekend. Will & Alison were down from Greenville and they dropped off a lot of their books & artwork for storage over the next few years while they’re at St. Andrews in Scotland. We also took them out to the Lil’ River Grill, a gourmet restaurant in Lawrenceville that I can get 50% discounts at through work. They’d recently changed their menu and the evening was, like our evening a year ago at The Marketplace, a food revelation. As the weekend has progressed, it’s becoming a much bigger revelation.

See, they also, in addition to the wonderful conversation over the weekend, gave Emily and me a 2-night stay at the Chateau Elan Spa (complete with meals, massages, facials, gifts… the works). It’s an incredible gift and as I’ve been looking through the brochure for Chateau Elan, I’ve been realizing how wonderful and how new all this gourmet food, fine lodging, and spa treatment is. You know, I grew up fairly poor. Red Lobster was a gourmet treat for us. To have a $200, mind-expanding dinner and then receive the gift certificate for a spa with more sumptuous amenities and services than I ever thought I would experience on this earth… all in one weekend… and then to go to church listening to Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, and then hear several Dan Forest arrangements that the choir was practicing… to put it mildly… I’m overwhelmed.

I talked with Emily this evening about how I’m still, after all these years, having a hard time coming to grips with God’s goodness. I have a beautiful wife, a wonderful healthy baby boy coming in a month to a fully-furnished nursery in a huge and beautiful house. I have a good, steady job. I have friends that most people would trade years of their life for—friends who challenge me, better me, and then lavish me with good things… from spa treatments to surprise CDs off my wishlist. I have a good job with extensive benefits. I have a church where people care about me and where I have outlets to serve. I’ve been protected by the Lord from wrecking my life (please understand how amazing that is). I’ve been given Christ’s righteousness in place of my sin—an abundant pardon far greater than mere forgiveness.

It’s times like this when I realize that, in the story Christ told of the servant who was hired for a day’s wage, and then, throughout the day, other servants were hired for the same amount, well… I’m the eleventh hour servant. I’m the one getting all the breaks. And I never expected that to be a difficult position to be in. I figured those servants had it easy and the others had it hard. But the difficulty of the last servant is in admitting that it’s entirely the Master’s generosity that gave him his wages. They (I) don’t want to realize that. If it’s only God’s generosity that gives you the good you have, then it takes that nice, firm slab of self-righteousness out from under you and you’re revealed as the wriggling little blob of Jello that you always were, incapable of standing on your own. The first servants have to consciously reject that false but firming slab of suffering self-righteousness and trust in God’s goodness. The last servants, though, have no suffering to stand on. They can feel the stares of servants who’ve had it much harder than they. My life is naked and open to the eyes of people like my parents or grandparents, who had it much harder than I.

It’s much like that quote by Rob Bell that I posted in my review of Velvet Elvis:

I was having breakfast with my dad and my younger son at the Real Food Cafe on Eastern Avenue just south of Alger in Grand Rapids. We were finishing our meal when I noticed that the waitress brought our check and then took it away and then brought it back again. She placed it on the table, smiled, and said, “Somebody in the restaurant paid for your meal. You’re all set.” And then she walked away.

I had the strangest feeling sitting there. The feeling was helplessness. There was nothing I could do. It had been taken care of. To insist on paying would have been pointless. All I could do was trust that what she said was true was actually true and then live in that. Which meant getting up and leaving the restaurant.

I really do feel helpless. Helpless in front of a Power intent on doing me good despite all my secret inner protests to the contrary. I believe I can hack it on my own—that I deserve some pain and, by golly, I’m going to pay my pound of flesh so that I can be self-satisfied. The trouble is that unrelenting goodness never hands over the knife. “I’m not asking you to repay,” it says. “You can’t. And I never want you to try.”

It reminds me of Babette’s Feast, a movie that I think I need to run out and buy right away. A refugee from Paris, who happens to be the best chef in the whole city (and, therefore, the world), hides with a strict religious sect in the Netherlands. This sect always prepares food as though it were entirely something to eat in pain, wincing out thanks that the body could live one more day on bread and water. The chef (Babette), announces that she would like to prepare a meal for the sect, and she prepares her most exquisite recipes for the feast. In the process, buying the most rare and lavish ingredients, she also uses up every penny of her considerable life savings. She sacrifices everything so that self-flagellating people could break out of their belief that their own pain makes them virtuous.

It’s a hard belief to relinquish. Just last Sunday, I taught Sunday school, trying to explain—in my short-circuited-brain sort of way—how God loves us so much that He rejoices to do us good… that He abundantly pardons, not says “Well, okay. I’ll forgive you, you ungrateful sinner.” It’s been an idea boring its way into my mind for a few months now, and yet this weekend, I prove to myself that I really still don’t understand it. What if it is God’s generosity that lays my lines in exceedingly pleasant places? Do I find fault with God for not putting me through pain? Can God’s purposes be accomplished with pleasure rather than pain?

On Wednesday night, we read a passage in 2 Samuel where David said “Thy gentleness hath made me great.” It wasn’t really part of Pastor Sweatt’s sermon, but it caught my attention. Do I really understand God’s love for me? Or do I, like Andrew Peterson has said, fear that “His love is no better than mine”?

Well, I don’t want this to simply be me questioning myself in front of others. My intention in writing is to work out some of these ideas and to encourage whomever may be reading that… it appears… that God frequently blesses us almost beyond what we can contain simply because He loves us and wants us to know something about what He Himself is like. He doesn’t scrimp. He doesn’t hold back. He doesn’t say “that gift is too big” or “it costs too much.” He didn’t spare His own Son, but gave Him up so that evil people could be rich in every good thing for all eternity.

He loves me, oh, He loves me, He does.