CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—T
There are 3 problems with this column: It is too long. It’s mostly personal history. It has no solution to the problem of human nature. So, read at your own risk.
When I was a young preacher, a couple came to me for marriage counseling. I’ll call them Don and Nan. I had known both of them casually when we were college students, before they married. We weren’t close friends during college, just acquaintances, really, but I was fairly well known in certain circles, because I was the only full-time [1] preacher in the ranks of adolescent college students.
So, after college, when they were married, and living in a town close to where I was preaching while going to seminary, they decided I should be their marriage counselor.
Actually, it was Nan who decided it. Because Don wasn’t being exactly faithful. In fact, he was failing rather spectacularly. Except he didn’t he didn’t see it as a failure.
I had learned in pastoral counseling class to begin marriage counseling with individual appointments, so Don felt comfortable, too much so, in explaining why he was unfaithful in marriage. “These women reach out to me with their eyes. They are so needy. I am simply trying to fulfill their needs.” In his mind, he was the messiah of sex.
Yes, I know that the eyes are the windows to the soul [Mt 6:22-24], but I’ve always been amazed at what some folks think they get from eyes. Don was definitely no George Clooney. Maybe Rainn Wilson [“The Office”]. It was hard to believe that all those girls [2] were beseeching him for sexual sustenance with their eyes. I have always suspected that we see in the eyes of others what is actually in our own eyes.
I told Nan that she didn’t
have a marriage problem. She had a human nature problem, because Don was a
delusional, egotistical, narcissistic, lustful nymphomaniac. [In seminary, you
learn a lot of new words and want to use them.]
It’s time to use a basketball reference, because it’s “March Madness” month. [And you probably thought it’s Lent.] When Coach K [I dare not try to spell Krzyzewski] of Duke basketball retired, he said that his greatest opponent was always human nature. Basketball players are human. They want to take the easy way. They want to do all the scoring instead of doing what’s best for the team. They want the rewards without the work.
Human nature is always the biggest problem for a counselor, too. You can help folks understand the origins of their problems, and all sorts of good stuff, but you can’t change human nature.
I think it was Grok, the
cave man, who often appears in “The Far Side,” who first said, “Human nature? I
think we were better off as Neanderthals. This human nature is a bitch.” [Don’t
blame me; I’m just quoting.]
Come to think of it, human nature isn’t just the biggest problem for basketball coaches and counselors. It’s the biggest problem for you and for me. So, if you want to do anything about it, take it up with the creator of human nature…
John Robert McFarland
1] “Full-time” is relative. I preached in one or more of my 3 churches every Sunday morning and evening, but I was a full-time college student throughout the week. I was, however, the only pastor those churches had. Whenever there was some pastoral need, I had to fulfill it. They weren’t frequent, but I did weddings and funerals, and special services, like Christmas Eve and Easter sunrise, and I made hospital visits and calls on shut-ins and newcomers.
2] Yes, we were still
girls and boys, not yet men and women. We were married, and college grads, and
definitely thought that we were all grown-up, but we were under 25, the age
when the frontal lobe decision-making part of the brain is fully developed. If
we made good decisions, it was only by luck.
