U-Turns
Shirley Chisolm (Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1675018)
What does it mean to you to have God present in your life?
We, as followers of Jesus and believers in the truths that we learn from scripture, at our best, try to integrate what we know into how we live on a practical level. While that sounds good, we then run smack into ourselves, our selfishness, our prejudices, our politics, and our worldview. The most common flow of influence seems to want to fit all the God stuff we know and believe into our framework of understanding of the world, but it sure makes sense that, if God is God, shouldn't we fit into his world? That can be really unsettling, because it means we eventually must drop some deeply held convictions on how the world should work but have little to do with Jesus' agenda. Easier said than done.
I ran across a good starting point for this kind of orientation of thought. It is from a liturgical book of hours and other devotions:
God be in my head, and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in my heart, and in my thinking.
These are healthy personal stop signs to heed instead of moving off in our own direction, only to look back over our shoulder to wonder where God went. If a person really desires to live and walk like Jesus might, this is not a bad place to begin.
The other week at our men's breakfast, one of the fellows related the story of George Wallace, former governor of Alabama. Wallace was a staunch and inflammatory segregationist who even planted himself on the steps of the University of Alabama in an attempt to keep the first Black student from enrolling. As you may recall, Wallace was later shot and paralyzed by an attacker while campaigning in Maryland. This was 1972 and Wallace was running for the Democratic nomination to the presidency as was a liberal Black woman, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress. Below is an excerpt from an article detailing her visiting Wallace in the hospital following the shooting.
On June 8, 1972, Shirley Chisholm shocked her supporters by visiting George Wallace in his hospital room in Silver Spring, Maryland. Chisholm was a political progressive; Wallace, then governor of Alabama, a notorious segregationist. They were rivals in the Democratic presidential primary, and Wallace had just been shot five times at point-blank range by an assassin.
“Shirley Chisholm! What are you doing here?” asked the governor, who would remain paralyzed and pain-ridden for life. Wallace knew he was her nemesis, and that her supporters would be angered by the visit. Her answer brought him to tears.
“I don’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” she said.
They chatted and prayed together until his doctors said he needed to rest. When she left, Wallace did not want to let go of her hand. His daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy has described Chisholm’s visit as altering her father’s life. “Shirley Chisholm had the courage to believe that even George Wallace could change,” she said. “Chisholm planted a seed of new beginnings in my father’s heart.”
Wallace became an ally to Chisholm. In 1974, he persuaded a group of southern congressmen to support her efforts to pass a bill extending the minimum wage to domestic workers. Later, he publicly renounced racism and sought forgiveness from black parishioners and civil rights leaders. In 1979, Wallace arrived in his wheelchair at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. He confessed to all the harm and misery he had caused. His own pain, he said, helped him understand the suffering of others. He begged forgiveness. As he left the sanctuary, the congregation rose and sang “Amazing Grace.”
Some skeptics insist that Wallace’s “apology tour” was a ploy to advance his political career. Witnesses say otherwise, including the civil rights leader John Lewis. “I could tell that he was a changed man,” Lewis wrote. “He acknowledged his bigotry and assumed responsibility for the harm he had caused. He wanted to be forgiven.” And Lewis forgave him. So did black voters in Alabama: Wallace carried more than 90% of the black vote in his final gubernatorial campaign in 1982.
George Wallace was changed when he reversed the flow from fitting God into his worldview to taking his compass headings from Jesus. The cost to Wallace was the scorn from supporters and churchgoers and rank and file white voters. He lost, but he gained so much more. In short, Wallace repented from his erroneous beliefs, and set out on a new path. Listening to the story over eggs at Jake's reminded me how each of us will face times when our assumptions are challenged and found wanting. The question lingers, "When that time comes, will I, too, repent of my sins?"
The Greek word we translate as repentance is metanoia. Literally, it means a change of mind about something or someone. Usually, believers tie repentance to salvation, but that is just the beginning of our metanoia-ing. As we move along our faith journey, we will be prompted by the Spirit to change our thinking (and then our doing) about most every part of our life. To fold our lives into a God-shaped life will take intention to be like Jesus rather than like my worldview, and some amount of courage to reverse course and take practical steps of change.
In a real sense, we spend our whole lives confronting yet another error in thought or action and doing metanoia. A few days ago, Claudia shared with me a nugget she gleaned from My Utmost for His Highest. Here, Oswald Chambers riffs on this idea.
There are whole areas of our lives that have not yet been brought into submission [to Christ], and this can only be done by continuous conversion. Slowly, but surely, we can claim the whole territory for the Spirit of God.
So, we're back to wondering what will be my reaction when I realize some of my closely held beliefs/biases/opinions are found to be not just false, but hurtful? When a courageous "Shirley" extends grace to me and I see my error, how might I respond? What if the cost of doing metanoia is high enough that I lose friends, or status, or am abandoned by the "tribe" I identify with? I certainly have blind spots, and so do you. They may be political or religious or racial or.... We can get into deep kimchi when we insist on trying to wedge God into our worldview and baptize our preferences rather than simply following Jesus.
How about if in this new year you and I commit to holding our worldview with a bit of a loose grip to give the Spirit room to nudge us toward a U-turn when it's called for. Sounds scary, but good at the same time. Let's go!
and now some music
How about a chuckle or two
"Johnny, where's your homework?" Miss Martin said sternly to the little boy while holding out her hand.
"My dog ate it," was his solemn response.
"Johnny, I've been a teacher for eighteen years. Do you really expect me to believe that?"
"It's true, Miss Martin, I swear it is," insisted Johnny. "I had to smear it with honey, but I finally got him to eat it."
__________
An efficiency expert was delivering a seminar on time management for a company's junior executives.
He concluded the session with a disclaimer: "Don't attempt these task-organizing tips at home," he said.
"Why not?" he was asked.
"Well, I did a study of my wife's routine of fixing breakfast," he replied, a little embarrassed. "I noticed she made a lot of trips between the refrigerator and the stove, the table and the cabinets, each time carrying only one item.
So I asked her, 'Honey, I notice that you make a lot of trips back and forth carrying one item at a time. If you would try carrying several things at once you would be much more efficient.'"
He paused.
"Did that save time?" one of the executives asked.
"Actually, yes," the expert answered, "It used to take her twenty minutes to fix my breakfast. Now I make my own in seven minutes."