When someone in your life is twisted and abusive,
And you’re constantly being poked by their thorns—
By thorns they could have
And should have
Removed long ago
Because they know better
And should know better—
And they even bear witness to the wrongness
By their own hating of such thorns in others
And their constant complaining about
Being pricked by them themselves—
Welcome to God’s world!
He has to put up with this moral stupidity from people
All the time.
And he has done so from the beginning.
And he sees it for what it is—
Even more clearly than you do.
It’s a person refusing to learn the very lessons
For which his life was set here in the first place.
It’s a person refusing to get with the program—
Refusing to yield himself to the Reality
By which the world operates.
And God deals with this all the time.
You have that one person in particular, or maybe two,
But God has billions of such people.
And why do you think that God has set your life here
Among the hordes of the morally stupid and clumsy?
What good could come from you being surrounded
By such a tide of uncaring, unloving,
And undisciplined behavior?
I believe that one reason is so that you can continue
To see how harmful those things are to you,
So as to finish the work of building your own convictions
About ridding your own character of the like—
Which work you have certainly not finished yet—
For what mortal can reach perfection in but a few decades?
And another reason is that you could,
While you are on your way—
If you wanted—
Try to help your fellow man to do better.
And if he does,
You have won him over.
And if he does not,
Have you not,
As imperfect as you may yet be,
Done the very thing God has done?
Have you not given the person a chance?
Have you not offered out the hope of change?
If you have loved him like this,
God will add it to his condemnation
Of the man’s obstinance in the end—
Assuming he has not by then changed his mind.
And if you have chosen instead
To hate the foolish man for his sins against you,
God will add it to his condemnation of his obstinance,
For he will demand an answer for why,
Having been stung by your hatred,
The man continued to sting others—
And why having seen you stumble at his hand,
He would continue to be a downfall to others.
We’re all here to learn the truth
And to yield ourselves to it—
Or not.
And none of us are fully yielded.
Nor will we ever reach such perfection here.
But we can certainly walk in that direction,
Drawing closer every day, yielding ourselves
Step by step.
And to some, this sounds good,
While to others, it’s a terror.
And is that not the dilemma of God himself?—
That some see him as good,
And others as bad?—
Some as attractive,
And others as repulsive?—
That some are seeking,
And others avoiding?—
And I should add,
That some pretend to seek
While they are actually avoiding,
Or seek in one way,
While avoiding in others?
So about those thorns—
You do not owe it to anybody
To be tortured by their deliberate sins,
Yet you can, if you choose,
Give your forbearance to them as a gift
And see how it goes.
And if you do,
You will have to choose how far to go—
How long to put up with it—
How much to suffer at their hands—
And whether it would ever be better for them
If you should walk away.
For while vengeance belongs only to God,
The right merely to walk away belongs to us all.
Yet I’m not so sure it’s supposed to be
Easy for us to walk away,
Even though we have the right,
Because we know that God is patient with us—
And how could we not extend
That same patience to others?
And I think that we are supposed to endure that struggle—
To embrace it and wrestle with it—
To get it right sometimes
And wrong sometimes—
And to be on the receiving end
When others get it right and wrong
About us.
And I think we are to realize the hugeness of the question,
“Whatever shall I do with you?”
And welcome to God’s world,
For he deals with this question
All the time.
And unlike us, he is the perfect judge
Of all matters and all people.
And even he in his perfection
Gives people a lifetime here
That they might learn the lessons
Built into this world.
And we are but judges in training,
Not even yet excellent
In judging all our own business well,
And much less that of others.
And he will decide how we have done on the whole.
And if he is pleased with us,
He will welcome us to his own world,
Which is better than this one.
And then we shall see
That we have chosen our path well.
