This year saw the release of many wonderful books, among them Lynne Stringer’s Keeper of the Archives.
Lynne is fantastic at world-building, characterisation and plot. A fascinating YA read, she posed the question: what if you could truly read everyone you met?
This, of course, got me overthinking in directions unrelated to the book. In the end I decided that for myself, while infinite perspicacity would indeed be a gift, privacy is also a gift. Not being able to see the random thoughts and emotions of others is what enables me to believe the best about people.
I know that my own heart is a mixed bag. For some time now I’ve been blissfully released from the burden of believing that ‘I am my worst thoughts’ and therefore a dirty rotten scoundrel. Some of my bad thoughts are my own fault: sins I choose to commit in my own mind. But it also turns out that the brain naturally bounces off stimuli, generating randomness; often these reactions, while ungodly, are not deliberate, and therefore not willful sins.
I do not, really really do not, want to intuit those unconsciously-sprouting nonsenses in other people while I’m interacting with them. One, it would feel like I was viewing their holey underwear: unfair and invasive! Two, I would take something like, ‘Can’t you shut up for two seconds?!’ far too personally. And if a person is making an effort to nod patiently while I rabbit on, then there is a gap between the brain-spit and the conscious loving act of listening. So, such firings would not be a reflection of the work of Christ in them – nor would they represent the whole of that person, how they feel about me, or who they are trying to be.
The trouble with the ‘privacy is best’ approach is that it does not truly accept people the way God does. The people I value most in my life are in fact the ones who have surmounted my enormous pile of flaws, and loved me anyway. My opting to keep my head in the sand is simply to pretend others don’t have flaws. And so I’m not really giving them the benefit of the doubt – I’m merely looking the other way. I’m not being a loving person; I’m simply remaining an ignorant one.
God, on the other hand, sees right into the core of my being. He sees the muddle of good intentions, snarky reactions, faith, poor choices, yearning to be better, jealousies, and wetware glitches. And He chooses to love me, knowing the whole ‑ having a plan to transform me, bit by frazzled bit, into His image.
I’ve heard it said that Christians are ‘living epistles, known and read by everyone’ (taken from 2 Corinthians 3:2-3). In fact, the sense of the passage is that our friends are the letter we write. ‘You yourselves are our letter,’ Paul says. The way we choose treat others shows the world who we are. The way those others speak of us bears a testimony to how well we tried to love them.
This Christmas, we will see or remember family and friends who are as flawed as we are. Some of them are people we struggle to get along with, forgive, or talk to. (Oh, the irony of not being able to relate to those we’re related to!) As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, let’s ask Him to help us love like He does: through all the rubbish and all of the masks, all of the contrasts and history – determined to go on choosing to love.
