What will not kill you

My grandfather couldn’t afford private school for all five children so he bartered with Mount Saint Charles Academy to deliver free bottled water from his spring in exchange for enrolling my father. The only problem was that my father was fresh out of the second grade, and classes at the school began in the fifth grade. My dad scraped by with a charitable 61 average the first year, flunked and was held back the second year, and did fine the third year. “How were things in the school yard with all those older kids?” I asked. “Oh, I got by,” he said, brushing off the question.

This was more or less an average childhood during the Depression, and it didn’t kill him. It could have been worse. He could have been cutting out glossy images of mashed potatoes, peas, and steak from a magazine to eat on a plate in an single room occupancy hotel while his father was AWOL as a traveling salesman and his mother was sent to a sanitarium, like the kid in the 1993 film King of the Hill. Come to think of it, that stuff didn’t kill that kid either. We survive suffering.

One of my main failings as a parent was trying to protect my children from any unpleasantness. That included spankings and all but minimal chores. This was at odds with God’s view of how to raise children: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die” (Proverbs 23:13). God added the explanatory half of that verse for reasons I’m not sure of, though we know we all survived things but we fear those same things will damage our children.

Someone who was a lesbian but quit said that while she came to the realization that she must give up her female lover in order to gain Christ, she had the hardest time believing that for everyone else. Her other lesbian friends’ unions seemed so stable, longstanding, and happy. It’s a funny thing: We believe for ourselves the demands of total sacrifice for Christ, but think that too harsh a calling for those we love.

As if it will kill them. But it won’t.

Jesus brooks no glibness: Count the cost (Luke 9: 57-62). Can you let someone else bury your father? Will you come at once, or do you have to have a farewell party and a dozen other things on your priority list? Can you walk away from your riches if He asks you to (Mark 10:21-22)?

A young man I know has a prosperous business, built from scratch by his own two hands. But the business doesn’t honor God, so I met him for lunch and urged him to walk away from it. It didn’t go so well. But I’m still hoping.

Let us take sides with God against how things appear, and call sin’s bluff.

There is a notion abroad that if you’re struggling for years with a stubborn sin and having no victory, maybe God hasn’t given you the grace for it, or maybe He is allowing that sin in your life to teach you humility and show you your dependence on Him. That is totally foreign to Scripture. I refused to endorse the book of a woman who came to my door with such a thesis. Jesus told a young man he healed to stop his sinning or something worse would happen to him (John 5:1-14). God said to Israel, “Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel” (Ezekiel 33:11).

Let us take sides with God against how things appear, and call sin’s bluff. “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). If we do not see people the way God sees people we will not have the nerve to give them the gospel. Our homeschooling gay neighbors will seem basically virtuous, and our children too fragile to discipline. But God calls that “hating” them (Proverbs 13:24).

And if you want to talk about damaging, here is what’s damaging: to live your life after Christ came as if He did not die to give you grace to give up all for Him. Pain and suffering will not kill you. What will kill you is not giving up your sin.