That Was Me, Not Too Long Ago

It's not surprising that if we're rooted in God's Word, we hear His voice everywhere. 

Over the holidays this year I reread Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon". The short story was later expanded into a novel of the same name, made into a movie with Cliff Robertson (which earned him an Academy Award for best actor), and adapted again numerous times on stage and screen. The movie's good, but the short story is brutal and beautiful in a way the movie can't come close to touching. It's short enough to be a one-sitting read (and I read slowly), but even that succinct, it's crushing. 

Keyes tells the story of a mentally handicapped man named Charlie Gordon who undergoes an experimental operation to increase his intelligence artificially. His I.Q. more than triples; over a period of weeks he becomes a bonafide genius, recording the process in a series of progress reports he writes every so often. At the beginning he writes like a five-year-old ("Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on."), and after the operation improves little by little; by the middle of the story he's talking like Stephen Hawking.

There is one particularly difficult moment in the story: Charlie, still getting used to being brilliant, is eating dinner in a restaurant. A dishwasher who is clearly mentally handicapped breaks some plates. The manager yells at him; the restaurant patrons laugh and tease. The boy, not realizing they're making fun of him, laughs along with them. Charlie laughs too—it is funny, after all—but then realizes the irony of the situation; not too long ago, he was the one laughed at, and he was the one laughing along. This realization infuriates him; he stands up, yells at the clientele, and storms out of the restaurant.

Charlie finishes his progress report like this:

     How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence. It infuriated me to think that not too long ago I, like this boy, had foolishly played the clown. 

     And I had almost forgotten.

     I'd hidden the picture of the old Charlie Gordon from myself because now that I was intelligent it was something that had to be pushed out of my mind. But today in looking at that boy, for the first time I saw what I had been. I was just like him!

Not too long ago

Reading this I realized how often I do this—how often we all do. How often do we get frustrated with unbelievers not following God? not believing? stubbornly resisting Him? persisting in sin and thinking they're doing nothing wrong?

Why do we react this way? Because we've forgotten that not too long ago we were in the same situation.

When Paul is teaching Titus how to pastor his church, he says that the congregation should be gentle and courteous to everyone. Why? "For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. " (Titus 3.3) 

He says, "Be courteous to those who are disobedient, and hateful, because we have all been disobedient and hateful. And what changed wasn't us."—

"But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, HE saved US, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy" (3.4-5, emphasis added).

Why are things different for us now? Because God showed us mercy. That's all. The dividing line between us and them is a cobweb a light breeze could tear through. We must always keep our old sin before our eyes (cf. Psalm 51.3, "my sin is ever before me"), because it helps us to remember how desperate our situation was, and that it is only God's strong hand that yanked us out of it and has held us out of harm's way.

So doing, when we consider our frustrating, unbelieving neighbors, we will realize we're no better, and show them the same mercy God showed us.