Letter #247: Lest We Forget

You have to see the dark to see the light.

Dad,

Alright, enough politics. Back to God. Not that our little detour into the gutter wasn’t charming and edifying. It was a reminder—lest we get fat and happy and forget—that we live in a mosh pit at best and a killing field at worst. American Christians are more liable than maybe any others in history to mistake their own comfort and safety for the normal state of the world. Good problem to have! May it never be solved. But the minute you lose your tragic sense of life, you’ve lost the vital quickening spirit of the faith.

Last week I had a conversation with a woman about my age, lovely as it is possible to be. To spare her privacy I’ll just say she works in one of medicine’s bleakest fields and deals every day with a level of suffering that makes people doubt God’s justice. Like many others in her position, she talks about it matter-of-factly, because for her it’s normal. At one point she laughed and said, I guess this is all a little depressing, isn’t it?

It pulled me up short. Objectively, she was of course right—it’s horrific that there are such things in the world. But it hadn’t occurred to me to be horrified. All I had been thinking at that exact moment, to be honest, was how much I admired her.

I told her so, and I took the opportunity to slip in a little evangelism after my somewhat unusual fashion. It is awful, you’re right, I said. But to me the point of being a Christian is you already know how awful things are. If something like this surprises you, your faith is too fragile. We live in a sin-torn war zone, and through the wreckage Christ goes walking bent and bloodied among the healers of men. “The wounded surgeon plies the steel. . .”

This weekend was the one we set aside precisely for remembering these things. It’s the time for visiting soldiers’ graves. We give them special honor, and very rightly so. But the horrible necessity that soldiers represent is also a reminder, to me, that on some level it’s all like that: row upon row of the fallen, each marked with a white cross.

Now I’m worried I’m being depressing, like my friend the healer. But you have to be a realist about how dark things are if you want to see the hope of resurrection for the blinding light that it is. That’s what God says to the Israelites, isn’t it, when they finally come into the promised land for the first time? The desert was a school of need for them, where they had to draw their nourishment direct from God. Then, on the brink of blessing them, he tells them: don’t forget.

He wanted dearly to give them everything—wealth, comfort, the fat of the land. But first he had to show them their need, and who could satisfy it. Lest they forget. Lest we.

Love,
Spencer