First published in The Daily Sentinel on Friday, May 23, 2008.
I read two books recently on very different subjects, but something this week made me see a connection between them. The first book was “Unchristian” by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons. The premise of the book is based on research among younger people, aged 16-29, who do not claim Christianity as their religion. What do they think about Christianity and the people who claim to be Christian? Well, here’s how one respondent put it:
“Christianity has become bloated with blind followers who would rather repeat slogans than actually feel true compassion and care. Christianity has become marketed and streamlined into a juggernaut of fearmongering that has lost its own heart.”
Ouch!
The second book that I read this week is “Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White” by Adam Hamilton. He’s a United Methodist pastor in the 
What brings these two ideas together for me is a tragedy that happened this week – a tragedy that has devastated me personally and pastorally. A woman who had been faithfully attending my church committed acts of extreme desperation. She gave up on life, and took another’s life along with her own.
“Jenny” (which is not her real name) was in her early 60s, and her mother (who was dealing with Alzheimer’s) would have been 100 this October. Jenny had just lost her boyfriend (he was also in his late 60s) to a heart aneurysm last week. His funeral was last Sunday, and I spoke to Jenny then. I knew she was going through a lot of grief, but did not know the degree of her pain. She was an incredibly private woman – and so I never got her full story.
And now I never will.
Jenny had been a part of the church ever since moving here from Florida six or seven years ago, and neither I nor anyone else who knew her saw this coming. I don’t know why she decided life was no longer worth living. I do think that Jenny took her mother’s life because she was her mother’s only caregiver, and she did not want her mother to “suffer” after Jenny was gone. It was desperate love that could only see black-and-white choices.
So now I am faced with a terrible guilty feeling. I think I am not alone. All who knew and loved Jenny are now saying the same things to themselves: What could I have done to prevent this tragedy? What if I had gone out to see her during the last couple of days before she killed herself? If only I could have penetrated her wall of privacy, I might have been able to give her the hope she needed. If only, if only….
But that’s another form of black-and-white thinking. It assumes an either-or outcome: If somehow I or someone else had done something differently, then Jenny and her mother would still be with us right now. But I am not certain it would have made a difference. Anything done in the last 48-to-60 hours of her life probably would not have changed Jenny’s behavior. Instead, she needed different behaviors from the last four-or-five years.
That brings me back to the “Unchristian” book. Young people aren’t the only ones with a suspicion of Christianity. People of all ages have experienced the unchristian acts and attitudes of Christians. Too often, we are considered judgmental, uncaring, hypocritical, and too political – because we are! The sad truth is that ALL of us are tainted with self-centeredness, with busyness, and with misplaced priorities. But Christians are supposed to be different than the rest of the world. We are supposed to have our priorities in line with God’s priorities, to love our neighbors unconditionally, to make sure our neighbors know how much they are loved, and risk opening ourselves up to experience their love in return!
Jenny’s tragedy should be a wake-up call to all Christians – not just those in my congregation – that we cannot wait to demonstrate the giving and receiving the love of Jesus Christ!!
The story of Noah is another tragedy. In Genesis 6, we find a broken-hearted God: “The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”
This is the same creation that just five chapters earlier, God had called “good.” And yet, humanity had fallen to the point that God was grieved for his creation. It was a black-and-white decision. Yet, God didn’t limit himself to the either-or-choice of keep creation/destroy creation. He found another way:
“But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark … I will establish my covenant with you.’”
That covenant was to re-establish the earth, to bring new goodness out of the evil. And God sealed the covenant with something WAY beyond black-and-white thinking, or even shades of gray. He sealed it with a rainbow!
O God, help me and those who loved Jenny find the rainbow in her tragedy! And may that change our behaviors so that we do not create the conditions for another Jenny to get trapped in black-and-white thinking and forget to see the rainbow of your unconditional love!
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