Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Ingenious Dock
and Illegal (a ‘Bob’)
for All Sorts Of Reasons
But
That Hardly Stops Them/Us!
Psalm 44:9
You have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-17
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing.
Words of Grace For Today
Bob had struggled to find his way through school. Early on he discovered that he was faster than almost everyone else, so in the school races he always came in first. That was his one success. He did not fit in with the other kids. He learned early on that he could rat out other students. When someone tried to take advantage of him he simply told the teachers and the other student would be made to pay. As he got older he learned that he did not need to report the exact truth, but if he was creative with his tales on students who he did not like, they would get worse punishments. As a teenager his creativity grew, always connected to bits of truths, so that he was rightly feared by other students and by his teachers. Then he learned to rat out his parents to the police, except the ‘rat’ was not at all true, though the police believed him. His parents feared what he would do next. His siblings loathed him.
Bob’s story was riddled with gaining advantage over others by ‘reporting’ them to the police. It was not long before the police figured out the lies were just that, but Bob was ahead of them with his ‘reports’ about the police to the security forces that dealt with all threats to national security. There, the 2nd in command recognized Bob’s ‘gift’, recruited him to be a regular ‘informer’, and Bob had found his calling, fighting for his country by ‘routing out the corruption from within.’ Except what Bob really did was ruin anyone who questioned the security forces and more specifically to the 2nd in command, who soon replaced the security forces commander.
Bob’s ‘war’ bought him privileges and luxuries enjoyed by only a small few. He was promised he’d be able to study as a doctor, his childhood dream. He would study, and then practice medicine, and continue to ‘rat’ out the corruption all around him. His ‘war’ would advance the security of the country.
Then, as is always wont with corruption so rife in totalitarian states, the state failed. Fortunately it was not isolated and left to become a haven for international terror and horrors. Once a part of a rather successful country, that country voted to reintegrate the failed state back into itself. The security informers, so well practised in their perverse reports about neighbours and friends and even family, had no purpose any more. Bob was suddenly left swinging in the wind, medical school was out of reach, and even his family would have nothing to do with him. So he emigrated to another country that would receive him. He lied about anything he needed to in order to get ahead, including his training as an RN to gain a job. In reality he had been allowed to train as a nurse’s aide. He moved to a province where RN’s were desperately needed, falsified his training records (claiming the school records no longer existed after the fall of his childhood state), and sat a written exam to qualify to work as an RN. He’d passed, barely. But now he had a profession as a registered nurse. His exploits did not end there. He continued to threaten and ruin people around him in order to get ahead. More than one person died as a result of his ‘work.’
This was Bob’s history.
This kind of history, this kind of ‘fighting a war’ by sending out ‘armies into battle’ is the kind of ‘army’ that the Psalmist writes about saying: God, You have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies. God does not ‘go out’ with any such effort to gain advantage for oneself at the cost of everyone else one encounters.
God’s way for us is on an entirely different route: it is to Rejoice always, pray without ceasing. We can live this way, no matter the challenges we encounter, when we realize that our lives are not given to us for us to use for out own advantage. We receive life in order that we can exercise God’s Grace for others, and often exercising that Grace for others requires that we sacrifice everything we would want from life.
At that point, when we have nothing left, when life is as good as gone from our hearts, minds and bones, then … and only then it seems … can we surrender to the life-saving grace that gives us new life. Then our lives are not our own, but we live fully aware (as much and unfortunately as intermittently as we are able) that we are saved by Grace alone and we owe everything to God. So we ‘pay it forward’ to those God sends our way.
We live, thus, as the saints of light have lived since the beginning of time: as reflectors of God’s truth, light, grace and love. In this way we GET to Rejoice always, pray without ceasing.