CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter
Bob Wilson recently said
in response to a CIW: “John, you are a complex and complicated man. I love you.
I wish I understood you.”
Fantastic! My plan is
working!
If anyone might have a
shot at understanding me, it would be Bob. We go back together as far as anyone
I know, to age ten, when my family moved from the low-crime part of the
inner-city of Indianapolis to a hard-scrabble farm a few miles out of Oakland
City.
Back in our day, kids born
between mid-October and mid-April started school in the middle of the year, at
the beginning of the second semester. There were about 30 of us in that class, 5A,
first semester of fifth grade, when I joined it. A remarkable group of great
kids it was, like Mike Dickey and Jarvis Reed and Shirley Black and, of course,
Bob Wilson.
A mid-year start was a
good plan educationally, but not bureaucratically, so in 8th grade,
our mighty mid-year group was folded back into the amorphous group that started
in the autumn after us, to form our high school class. They were all great
kids, but slow learners; they elected me class president three years in a row.
Yes, Bob has known me a
long time, but I still have him convinced him that I am complex. I’m not nearly
as complicated as he thinks. I’m really quite simple. All I want out of life is
whatever I want whenever I want it. That’s not all that complicated, is it?
If Bob understood that,
though, he might not love me. As long as I can keep him in the dark about how
self-centered I really am, he’ll still love me and be my friend.
That’s how we think, isn’t
it? We must keep our real, secret, simple self-centered selves hidden behind
complicated complexities, or folks won’t love us. Even God.
That, though, is selling
Bob short. I think he would love me even if he understood me. God, too. That is
the nature of love.
Bottom line: God does
understand me, and still loves me. Bob does not understand me, but still
loves me. You can’t get better than that.
JRMcF
I tweet as yooper1721.
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