John Fischer The Catch

I’m not so sure I would have let me go.

I walked around the corner of my garage this morning at 4:42 a.m. to find two very powerful police flashlights trained on me. They had gotten a 911 call from Chandler’s cell phone, and even though I tried to tell the emergency operator it was a false alarm, I knew they would come anyway. They had to come, and probably nothing I could do or say would have stopped them from coming. What if I had a victim trapped in the house who had managed to dial 911 before I commandeered the phone and told the operator it was a false alarm? Would I trust me?

It all started at 4:30 a.m. when my cell phone alarm went off but it wouldn’t let me get past the lock mode. Every time I tried my password it failed; plus, there was a weird picture on the screen I had never seen before. Had I dropped my phone one too many times and now it was frozen? I turned it off and back on — a move that usually fixes a frozen state, but it came back with the same picture and would not take my password. That’s when I noticed a button in the lower right corner for emergency calls. Thinking it was most certainly frozen and not able to deliver that call, I punched it out of curiosity and the call went through. “O (bleep), now what do I do?”

I tried to stop the call but it was too late. I could hear the voice of the operator asking if I was all right. Was there an emergency? Why did I dial 911?  And then: “If you are in trouble, just tap the phone.” That’s when I knew I had to answer, but when I did, and I tried to explain why, I sounded pretty lame to myself. Then she read my phone number back to me and it was not my number. All I could say was “My phone’s all screwed up.” And then she asked for my address. Of course I gave it to her but I could see where this was going. “There’s no need to send anyone out here. Everything’s all right; it was just a false alarm.” Yeah, sure!

By now Marti was awake, and as I tried to tell her what was going on, I realized I had the wrong phone. This wasn’t my phone; it was Chandler’s phone. No wonder the password didn’t work but the call did. Marti tried to get me to call back on my phone, but I knew it was useless. What could I say that would remove all doubt? Wouldn’t they have to check to be sure? And when I started out front and saw the flashlight beams, I knew I was right.

They asked me what was going on. They asked me about the cell phone. They asked me who was in the house. They asked me about the cars out front. They explained how in domestic cases it was common for the perpetrator to come out and try to stop them from going in, and because of that, they were going to have to go through the house just to make sure. I understood all of that, but couldn’t think of anything I could say that would make them trust me. I imagined everyone awakened. I imagined the dogs going nuts. I imagined the neighbors going nuts over the dogs going nuts. I imagined the neighbors seeing me out front being detained by the cops. None of this was good.

That’s when everything switched. It must have been something I said, or something about my body language that gave away my stupidity, but one of them decided to make a “judgment call” and call off the search. And then, as quick as God’s grace, they were gone.

Relieved, I went back in the house, but as they drove away, I wondered if I would have trusted me.

Grace and mercy are pretty downright amazing. Imagine you standing before a perfect, holy and righteous God. Knowing who you are and what you have done, if you were God, would you let you go?

I met one of my heroes yesterday. The church I attended had a guest speaker I was eager to hear and meet. He has been one of my favorite commentators on Christianity and culture for many years and I have quoted him on numerous occasions. I once wrote him to thank him for being such an important spokesperson for living out the truth in the real world. Here is a man for whom there is no separation of sacred and secular, instead, God has shown him how to think in such a way as to sanctify everything and pass on that ability to others. So it was with great admiration that I went up afterwards to meet him and thank him personally for what his work had meant to me.

I was so focused on this that it caught me off guard when, upon hearing my name, he welcomed me as celebrity, and introduced me to everyone around him as his hero. Apparently my music had had a significant influence on his early years, and that letter I sent so many years ago has been a treasured encouragement ever since. Hearing this made me think of a letter I once received from the late Herb Caen, revered columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, admiring my book that I had sent him because it had a piece about him in it. That was a letter from my hero saying, “Nice job.” I still have that letter in a frame.

So there we were, mutual heroes meeting for the first time.

It makes me wonder now if all our encounters couldn’t be like this, for isn’t there a way that we are all heroes to someone? So when I meet you, I meet a hero. Why are we heroes? It’s not because of us anyway; it’s because of what God has done for us and through us. We have merely received from Him what we have passed on to someone else, but in that exchange, we became important as a conduit of truth and love. So in reality, this wasn’t a mutual appreciation society meeting as much as it was a worship moment — a time to thank God for each other.

Think of who has been an influence in your life. Write them a letter today and tell them so. You never now how important that could be.

And then let’s think of everyone we meet today as if they were a hero … because they are.

I once cared for a trellis of wild roses along one side of a stone wall in front of our Massachusetts house. Every spring the plants needed to be weeded and cut back to encourage blooming. Long strands of thick, thorny shoots that bore no flower had to be pruned out leaving the softer, younger plants full of buds to receive all the attention. The thorny stems constantly fought with me, poking through leather gloves and ripping open the plastic lawn and leaf bags I tried to force them into. My hands were puffy for days after this ordeal, and my arms, a road map of scratches.

It is in caring for love that a man experiences his deepest pain. Men are, by nature, irresponsible. To look after a woman in the same manner in which he looks after his own needs and wants is a severe test for any man.

Most men think they got something when they got married, few see marriage in terms of what they give up, and yet this is the fundamental truth for which marriage is the prime human example. “Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy” (Ephesians 5:25).

What does it mean for a man to give himself up for his wife? For Jesus Christ it meant losing his reputation and becoming a servant. It meant humbling himself and becoming obedient to something other than his own interests. For God to lose his reputation and give up the honor due him is no small thing. For a man, it means he foregoes his need for attention and focuses his attention onto his wife. He is over all his insecurities and need for approval. If he never got it, then he is over never getting it. If he got too much, then he is over being special. He does not allow self-indulgence; he lives for someone else. Whether he got praise or didn’t get praise, it doesn’t matter since he sees himself as a servant either way. He is a giver of praise not a praise-seeker. Here is a man whose wife is more important than his reputation. And to get to this place is painful. None of this comes naturally. For Jesus, it came by way of a cross.

No man can expect any less painful a path.

Love is a rose but you better not pick it
Only grows when it’s on the vine
Handful of thorns and you know you’ve missed it
Lose your love when you say the word, “Mine.”
– Neil Young

“Only grows when it’s on the vine.” This is different from the rose a man might bring his wife on a special day (any day, for that matter). That rose has been picked, but his wife is growing in her own garden. You don’t “pick” this rose, you care for the whole plant. You tend to the soil, water it, weed it, and sometimes get scratched up in the process. You don’t “pick” your wife’s beauty. You don’t cut her off at the stem and put her on display. You come to her garden where she is growing and blooming. You appreciate her source of life and you give life to it.

As much as I like this song by Neil Young (most of us know the Linda Ronstadt version), I must take issue with the last two lines. Grabbing a handful of thorns is not proof that you missed it. On the contrary, it is probably the first indication that you’ve really got something there.

In the popular book, The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks, Noah Calhoun has to learn to cope with his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease — the thief of hearts, souls and memories. Whenever he tries to get near his beloved — to take the flower in his arms again — he is stabbed by an armful of thorns. She does not know him. She distrusts him. She is belligerent with him. She is beyond his reach. But Noah has discovered that to love is to lose oneself, and so all his attentions are given over to loving this woman who does not know him anymore, whatever the cost. Meticulously, sometimes painfully, he discovers the love he has had for her all along is enough for the two of them. Sometimes he gets more thorns than flowers, but one whiff of a bloom is enough to keep him going. It is a tender story of how far love can go no matter how thorny the path.

And finally, you don’t lose your love when you say the word “Mine,” as long as you mean by that: My responsibility. My job. My sacrifice. My woman to win, even if it means over and over again.

If you can’t handle thorns, how can you ever expect to hold a woman?

A rose is an odd mismatch of beauty and pain and yet God blends these two things
together in the same plant. This cannot be a mistake – an oversight along the
production line of creation. Roses were meant to come out this way. To
entangle their beauty and delicacy in a maize of twisted barbed wire. Perhaps
to protect as much as anything. Perhaps to injure those who try to approach
the beauty carelessly, or even those who are careful, for love is never
without injury.

Love means to be misunderstood.
Love means being rejected.
Love means the things that are important to you will not always be
treated by another with the same value and care that you put to them.
Love means sacrifice.
Love means being vulnerable and being vulnerable almost always means you
will get hurt.

Love means giving up yourself — having your selfishness torn from you in a
manner that leaves you defenseless. This is perhaps the most painful of all
the activities of love, since we are all so protective of ourselves. We have
all found comfort in ourselves — in our own ways of doing things. The
proverbial marital battle over how to properly squeeze toothpaste out of a
tube is not insignificant. It is a small picture of the larger struggles of
ways and means.

There is comfort in the self. With years of self-talk, we have talked
ourselves out of our guilt and our shame. We have developed ways of dodging
the truth that shield us from truth’s double-edged probing. We can perpetuate
almost any reality in our own minds. In the safety of our own personal
self-propaganda, there is no one to challenge us, no one to disagree.
Elaborate schemes and intricate systems of rationalization go uncontested.
And since we will stop at nothing to ensure our own comfort, we will learn
little of love should we remain invulnerable.

But it is a thin membrane that protects the self, and love’s thorns can
puncture it with ease and tear it open. This is the painful service that love
provides for us: it strips away our protective layer leaving us open to both
hurt and love, and since we are human and fallible, we cannot love without
hurting or be loved without being hurt.

Hold the rose and feel the thorns.
Next week will be week three in a five-part series on “What is Worship?” I am teaching in an adult education class at Irvine Presbyterian Church, 4445 Alton Parkway, Irvine, California. The class is in the Jack Davis room at 9 a.m. on Sundays. Those of you in southern California are invited to attend. We’re over a little after 10:00 so you might have time to get to your own church service, or you are certainly welcome to attend the morning service at IPC at 10:30 a.m.. The sessions are being recorded so if the rest of you would like to listen in, the audio can be found by clicking HERE. Hope to see some of you there next Sunday.

I call it the One Thing Syndrome. It’s that one thing in your life that if you could fix, you would have most, if not all your problems solved. It can be anything – a bad habit, a disability, a secret sin, a mental disorder – but the one requirement is that it bears the weight of everything else in your life that is not right. What it turns out to be is one big excuse. Believe me, I know of what I speak. I could tell you what my Thing 1 is but, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is for you to think about yours and not turn it into a convenient scapegoat.

It’s a lie. It’s debilitating. It’s what the enemy uses to render us powerless to change. Change doesn’t happen over night. Change is a process over time. We’re not talking about winning the spiritual lottery here; we’re talking about overcoming, little by little, step by step.

The One Thing Syndrome means you don’t have to pay attention to anything else. It’s like the cripple who spent his whole life by the pool of Siloam, unable to jump in and be healed when an angel stirred the water because someone would always beat him in. If it ever occurred to him to go home and get on with his life as a cripple (If God wants to the heal me, fine, but I’m not going to put the rest of my life on hold waiting to find out), he chose not to do that. It was easier to make this one thing the reason nothing else was possible.

I’m thinking of Joni Eareckson Tada, paralyzed from the neck down as a teenager, and accomplishing what few have been able to do with all their facilities in good working order. She writes, she speaks, she paints, she inspires and she has formed an organization to help others cope with similar struggles. You don’t see her sitting by the pool waiting for angels.

This is not to say that God can’t give healing or victory over that one thing – He may choose to do that – it means that we will not use that one thing as an excuse to not do anything else.

I would venture to guess that we all, to one degree or another, have that one thing that is keeping us from growing. I would like to suggest today, that instead of spending another day trying to do something about that one thing, that we call on the Holy Spirit to help us pay attention to everything else. Leave that one thing to God. He’s the only one who can do anything about it anyway.