In Our Skin


Dear Eugene,

This morning, still easy like last night's breeze, I feel priggish, like a scholar wanting to organize his stuffs in point form lest people miss the luster in the gold nuggets he has to offer.

There was a time in my life when all I do is to show off my nuggets of truth, put them under the sun at a perfectly strategic angle to let out their unhinged glory, make them glow in a way to take shine off others' nuggets, to blind the world once and for all.

"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends," Jesus told his disciples, those who claim to follow him and his way, to do things the way he does, who claimed to trust, to "have faith" in what the Father was and still is doing through him the Son.

I say I would die for truth...

Jesus answers I am the Truth and you have no need to die so that I can shine.  I shine all by myself.  I am not asking you to die for an ideology, a set of high moral, good doctrines, a healthy lifestyle, or even a spirited mission.  I am asking you to die for your friends, the way I died for you.  If you have a point to make, if your life is to speak the Truth that is me, then give yourself away so that you can pass on the life I have given you in my dying and resurrecting...

 No wonder the next thing Jesus said to his disciple was: "If you find the godless world is hating you, remember it got its start hating me. If you lived on the world’s terms, the world would love you as one of its own. But since I picked you to live on God’s terms and no longer on the world’s terms, the world is going to hate you."

The world is full of truth experts, and they are all hostile to Jesus and his ways.  We want our nuggets to shine, say we'd die for their truth if we need to, kill a neighbor or two to uphold them if necessary.  We are all god-haters through and through.

A leper came to Jesus and was healed by the "one like a son of man" who wore his skin.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KartiniMay 26, 2018 at 11:43 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    At this moment as I write to you, my daughter is bedridden with a peculiar gastrointestinal ailment of unknown etiology, a health crisis which has persisted around the clock & halted all planned activities over the course of 5 weeks & now potentially counting beyond. Our family has consulted three physicians in addition to a medical specialist in the field. The terror of uncertainty perpetuates.

    Having observed her misery & desperation firsthand, I begin to tally the losses, both trivial & substantial, on her behalf & mine: missed school tests & assignments, vanishing conversations with families & friends, absence from worship services, postponed driver’s education for teens, canceled day hikes & afternoon running & the consequential omissions of activities & experiences incessantly thrive in silence. I rarely see her nowadays as she conceals her face & reshapes herself in a fetal position to alleviate pain. My last recall of her reduced to this shrunken form was the time when she was a baby curled up in my arms like love & poetry personified in flesh & bones.

    When one becomes bombarded with vivid confrontations of agony daily & nightly, the world warps & quakes as if ridiculing the absence of a rational explanation & eradicating every kernel of hope intended to be nurtured & ripened in due season. I had earthquake-defying expectations & objectives for my daughter. She would be a rising star to adorn the constellation of cosmic wonders. My unfulfilled dreams & impoverished imagination - and I have many - would be realized through her flourishing life. If there were a greater love than mine for her, I could not fathom it by human standards.

    Yet if I were to truly reexamine my love for her - dissect every facet of it & scrutinize individual components like a granular specimen under the microscope of self judgement without mercy or denial - I wonder in truth whether I have adored her or her potential to achieve. Confrontation of the abject self can be intolerably cruel.

    Would I risk my life for my daughter - or for my ideals? What about dying for other children whose parents love them equally & possibly more intensely & selflessly? What about losing my life for God’s children & my friends?

    "I am not asking you to die for an ideology… I am asking you to die for your friends, the way I died for you. If you have a point to make, if your life is to speak the Truth…”

    As I continue this journey with my daughter in her most pivotal season of calculated losses & possibly gains in faithful disguise, I pause momentarily - among the roaring & flashes of personal ambitions & aims - to search internally the reason for my existence & what this entails for me to live out the Truth.

    Yours, K

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