Facing the Unpleasant Truth
As the truth about you emerges from some probing stimulus, you will either face it directly or turn from it. You will mellow or harden, depending on what you choose to do about your discovery.
A young couple stepped into the counseling room. “How is it that at times we can be so cooperative, so tender toward each other, and 15 minutes later so opposed, so hostile, so cold?” asked Marvin, the husband. “How is it possible that we can pray together and feel united in our faith but when Sunday is past, or our time of morning devotions over, we don’t even think of God and we battle each other?”
Marvin then opened the door on their lives to afford a glimpse inside. He remembered the day he and Gloria, his wife, had driven to the city hospital and parked. As they glanced up to the eighth floor, Marvin breathed a prayer for their three-year old son who hovered there between life and death. “Dear God, we love our boy and we want him, but may Thy will be done. Help Gloria and me to be worthy parents and give Jimmy a happy home.”
At that moment Marvin and Gloria felt closer to each other than at any time in their lives. Carefully he helped her out of the car; arm in arm they walked to the door and made their way up to the boy’s room. Jimmy was asleep. A solution of some sort was being fed from a bottle into his arm. The parents looked at their son and their hearts beat as one for him. Marvin felt that he could never speak harshly to the boy again, that he could know no selfishness toward his son. Jimmy recovered. What joy for Marvin and Gloria to bring him home! But after a week, the feelings Marvin experienced at the hospital had changed. In fact, antagonism toward both his wife and son crept into Marvin’s heart.
The boy had been waited on night and day in the hospital. After he arrived home, Gloria kept up the pampering. This provoked Marvin.
“When are you going to let him grow up?” he asked his wife.
One evening Jimmy was playing on the floor near the sofa where his parents were reading. Insistently, he said his mother should go into the next room and fetch his favorite truck. She put down her magazine and started for the toy.
“Let him go for it himself, Gloria,” Marvin said.
“I don’t mind getting it for him,” she replied.
Marvin nearly exploded. “You’re spoiling him rotten! All he needs to do is point a finger and you jump.”
Dad insisted that the boy get his own toy. The child begged and pleaded and began to whine. Gloria became increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, she defied her husband and got the truck. Jimmy was happy, but his father was enraged.
After Jimmy went to bed, a silence developed between the parents. Marvin felt quite justified for having taken his stand. Gloria felt Marvin was being too strict. Whereas in the car outside the hospital and by their son’s bedside they had shared the tenderest of feelings and identical goals, now they were distinctly opponents.
The associations of most people parallel at some time the fluctuating course in which Marvin and Gloria found themselves. The details vary, but the theme is the same. What father has not pledged himself to being a great dad and a wonderful husband and then has found himself so angry at both his wife and children that he is capable of lashing out and hurting the very ones he loves?
The Bible describes this dilemma: “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me” (Rom. 7:15, 20).
What is it that keeps Marvin and Gloria from making good on their commitments to live consistently? They must be saved from themselves, just as the Apostle Paul wrote that the solution to his dilemma was outside of himself: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God–through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin” (Rom. 7:24-25).
Any person who would hit the target of consistency must be saved from the drive within him that causes him to miss the mark. He must first discover and then face the truth about himself. He must realize that God alone is the One who can help him. John wrote in his first epistle:
If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us. But if we freely admit that we have sinned, we find God utterly reliable and straightforward–He forgives our sins and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil. For if we take up the attitude, “we have not sinned,” we flatly deny God’s diagnosis of our condition and cut ourselves off from what He has to say to us (1 John 1:8-10, PH).
When this was brought to their attention, both Marvin and Gloria responded negatively. “Are you calling us sinners?” They found it hard to face the truth, even though they were fully aware that their behavior was inconsistent. They knew they both missed the mark that they had agreed to aim at.
How thoughtful and compassionate and generous we intend to be toward others in our relationships. Husbands and wives, or partners in a business, chart a course that each fully expects to follow. But somewhere along the way the trail is lost, one deviates from the path, and the target is missed. God says this waywardness is iniquity, or sin. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, everyone, to his own way” (Isa. 53:6).
Yet who wants to agree that such failure is sin? Rather than face the truth, a person makes excuses: “I’m snappish today because I’m tired.” “I spanked the child because his stubbornness makes me so mad I can hardly see straight.”