part ii

(part i)

A bell rang from the house, but while her obedience was captured, her attention was not.

She stood and brushed at the grass clinging to her jeans and tangled in her hair. She took one more long survey of the land surrounding her and was just about to turn to go in when something caught her eye. A bright light was flashing from the river. The bell rang again just as the wind swept up behind her. It hurried her forward, towards the river. But then she stopped and looked back at the house. She couldn’t go. Not yet.

She turned and walked to the house.

Even though she told herself in the course of the passing days that she wasn’t curious, still her thoughts were tied to the land: the flat, wide-open space to the west and the lush and lazy growth to the east. The river drew her, and she found herself out in the field, gazing to the east as the days fled away. The bright light from the river had not appeared again.

She didn’t know how long, but it must have been weeks later. The air had turned cooler, but still she was outside in the late afternoon, watching the sun and drinking in the land. The bell had rung and she was just turning to go inside when she suddenly saw it again: the blinking light on the river.

She shielded her eyes and tried to make out what it was, but to no avail. The river was too far away. Again the bell. The conflict in her mind was great, but this time, brief. She knew nothing, not why she was drawn, not what she would find there, nothing. But she knew this: she was compelled to go. And so, she gave one parting glance to the house, and then took her first of many steps toward the river.

Great quote

from Steph at sugerbuzz

Washed clean

My brother made a mistake.

It’s interesting, because he made a mistake the way most of us make mistakes: early and oft-repeated. He was working on a math sheet, and in the very first question, he made a multiplication mistake due to an error in carrying the decimal place. All of the questions that followed were similar, and so, because he was so confident he had completed the first question correctly, he carried that same mistake through the rest of the worksheet.

At first, he didn’t understand the error I was pointing out to him. I took a separate sheet of paper and did the question while he watched, and I saw the realization slowly dawn on him.

“Does that make sense?” I asked him.

“Okay, but I’m still confused,” he said.

“What are you confused about?” I asked.

“Well, that means I have to do the whole thing again.”

“Ah,” I said, understanding dawning in my own mind. “So you aren’t confused, but rather frustrated.”

Yes, he was sincerely frustrated.

I told him to take a break — to take ten minutes of not doing homework before he came and tackled it again — and in these ten minutes, I’ve been sitting here trying to determine how to make this a positive learning experience. I am so unbelievably struck by the strong analogy that this situation is for how God deals with our mistakes, but it is an analogy that I don’t think he will be able to see at this point.

As much as he was frustrated that he had to re-do the worksheet, I think sometimes the hardest part about correcting a mistake is taking apart the work that’s already been done. His worksheet was entirely covered in pencil. Granted, pencil can be erased, and often, quite cleanly. But a pencil-covered sheet of paper represents work. And erasing it represents destruction, even if it is of work that is poorly or incorrectly done. He had begun erasing it, but it was in anger and frustration. The paper has a crinkle or two that is evidence of this. So I suggested that he take a break and remove himself from the situation.

From my perspective, mistakes in a math sheet are not earth-shattering. I do remember what it was like to be in his shoes. Having to do a math worksheet in the first place was an arduous and lengthy process, not to mention re-doing it. But years have passed and I have grown a little wiser. My state of mind was significantly calmer and so, while he was gone, I erased the page.

And it was during this erasing that I was struck with the analogy. Our sins of scarlet will be made white as snow, I thought, as I watched clean, white paper emerge from underneath the pencil markings. For this is what God does.

“Everything in your life that you learn,” I told the young one, “you will learn in one of two ways: either because someone tells you how to do it and you listen or because you make mistakes and then learn how to fix them. This is that second way. You’ve made a mistake and now you’re learning how to fix it.”

I didn’t do his homework for him. In fact, I didn’t even help him correct it. In fact, aside from the above, I haven’t said much more than encouragement since he’s come back out to try again. All that I did was I gave him a clean slate from which to start.

The interesting thing about that slate is that he did do two of the questions correctly. I looked at his work and debated for a moment before I erased the sheet completely.

And that is the part that frustrates us about God.

“This part was fine,” we say. “We did it correctly. The answer was right. This was fine. Why did you erase it?”

Because the truth is, even though his method and answers were correct for those few questions, his knowledge and understanding of why they were correct was incomplete. I wanted his new understanding to affect every part of the worksheet.

The situation this evening does not make for a perfect analogy, because I am not perfect and the young one is not perfect. But for just a moment, imagine that I was simply an observer, and that the stakes were higher than merely a math sheet, and instead of me helping my little brother correct his homework, we have God Incarnate cleansing the world of all the mistaken pencil lines, smudges, and blackened sheets.

I’ve written before (though maybe not here) about this world being an echo of the eternal. Our longings are for things that last, for that is how we have been designed. And tonight, the shadows of our interaction painted for me images of incredible colour and vibrancy. While I cleaned penciled errors from a sheet of paper, Jesus Christ cleans the indelible mark of sin from our lives.