14. Love Means Acceptance
14
Love Means Acceptance
One aspect of the pain of being alone is probing for explanations as to how I managed to “deserve” this when I’ve tried so hard to be good. We look at friends who seem to have everything who aren’t really much “gooder” than we are. Some of them (if we do say so ourselves!) are much worse.
In Job’s day it was understood that good would always be the reward for righteousness, and evil would be the punishment for unrighteousness. When “that righteous man” was stripped of houses, crops, animals, servants, sons, daughters, the confidence of his wife, and his own health, there was, so far as his friends could see, only one possible explanation: Job was at fault. Neither they nor he knew of the strange drama enacted in the court of heaven when God called Satan’s attention to Job’s blameless faithfulness.
“Of course Job trusts you—so far!” was Satan’s retort. “You’ve given him everything. But take it all away and he’ll curse you to your face.”1
We do not know how many times God and Satan have faced each other over a single individual’s faithfulness, but we do know that God permits evil to touch everybody, the holiest as well as the wickedest. Satan’s question remains: Will he keep on trusting? I can imagine the hosts of heaven (and perhaps of hell) waiting for the answer with bated breath.
The answer of faith is YES. Acceptance. Job on his ash heap does not strike me as a very patient man. He was quickly fed up with his friends and had many questions, arguments, and accusations against God. God let him dish them all out before He began not to answer but to bury Job with an avalanche of unanswerable questions of His own. At last Job acknowledged God’s omnipotence and the limitations of his own understanding. “I knew of you only secondhand. Now I see you with my own eyes. Therefore I melt away and repent in dust and ashes.” He had nothing left to say.2
The faith of Job is astounding in view of how much less he knew of the love of God than we who know Him through the life and death of Jesus Christ. We have a whole Bible full of revelations about suffering. Job’s response was perhaps closer to capitulation than acceptance, but it was enough. God told his friends Job had spoken the truth about Him while they had not.
We have been shown the way of acceptance on every page of the life of Jesus. It sprang from love and from trust. He set His face like a flint toward Jerusalem. He took up the Cross of His own will. No one could take His life from Him. He deliberately laid it down. He calls us to take up our crosses. That is a different thing from capitulation or resignation. It is a glad and voluntary YES to the conditions we meet on our journey with Him, because these are the conditions He wants us to share with Him. Events are the sacraments of the Will of God—that is, they are visible signs of an invisible Reality. These provide the very place where we may learn to love and trust. Heaven waits for our response.
Accept your share of the hardship that faithfulness to the gospel entails in the strength that God gives you. For he has saved us from all that is evil and called us to a life of holiness—not because of any of our achievements but for his own purpose. Before time began he planned to give us in Christ Jesus the grace to achieve this purpose.
2 Timothy 1:8–10 Phillips
That is a wonderfully comforting word to me. God had included the hardships of my life (which I confess have been few) in His original plan. Nothing takes Him by surprise. But nothing is for nothing, either. His plan is to make me holy, and hardship is indispensable for that as long as we live in this hard old world. All I have to do is accept it.
“The life of a soul is so great a thing, that one of those distilled acts of faith and acceptance, without any light or feeling, is of greater activity and of greater vitality in God’s sight than the tramp of armies and the power of those who command them.”3
It is important to repeat that this acceptance I speak of is not passivism, Quietism, fatalism, or resignation. It is not capitulation to evil or a refusal to do what can and ought to be done to change things. It is a distilled act of faith, a laying of one’s will alongside God’s, a putting of oneself at one with His kingdom and His will.
Acceptance is abandonment, the great risk of great lovers, when an awesome power is given over—the power to hurt. No one in the world has such power to hurt as a husband, wife, or intimate friend. To love is to be vulnerable to that power which lies in the hands of the one loved. When a mother looks into the faced of her tiny newborn child, she knows that that little creature already has the power to rake her soul with pain, a power which will grow as the child grows. “A sword shall pierce thy own soul,” said old Simeon to Mary (Luke 2:35 KJV). To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?
Acceptance of discipleship is the utter abandonment of the disciple, the surrender of all rights, to the Master. This abandonment, in all cases, will mean pain. Christ listed some of the troubles His followers could expect, so that they would not be taken by surprise and thus discard their faith in Him. He did not offer immunity. He asked for trust.
Some couples refuse the risk of abandonment and draw up marriage contracts, hoping to shield themselves from the difficulties marriage inevitably brings. Such a contract is self-defeating, for a marriage must be based on trust. A contract presupposes the absence of trust and resorts to the language of politics (equality, rights, fairness) instead of the language of love. Love accepts—this man or woman, with all his or her faults, peculiarities, and exigencies. Where there is no trust, no abandonment, no self-giving—in short no such thing as love as the Bible defines it—it is not to be wondered at that such marriages easily collapse.
As we have noted, Jesus published no false advertising. He was offering the kingdom of heaven—bliss, eternal life, fullness of joy. But he spoke of the small gate and the narrow road. He promised suffering, not escape from suffering. You cannot take up a cross and at the same time not take up a cross, or learn how to die and how not to die.
While the Lord draws up no contract with us, the great thing for us is to remember how the kingdom of heaven works—life out of death is the operative principle. Where there is a clear and shining Purpose behind and under and above it all, faith can say an honest YES.
Amy Carmichael knew a good deal about suffering of many kinds, including loneliness. She knew the temptation to try to escape by forgetting, by drowning the trouble with activity, by shutting oneself off from the world, by surrendering to defeat and sullen resentment. She also knew that none of the above would lead to peace. She found what does lead to peace, here and now:
He said, “I will forget the dying faces;
The empty places,
They shall be filled again.
O voices moaning deep within me, cease.”
But vain the word; vain, vain:
Not in forgetting lieth peace.
He said, “I will crowd action upon action,
The strife of faction
Shall stir me and sustain;
O tears that drown the fire of manhood, cease.”
But vain the word; vain, vain;
Not in endeavor lieth peace.
He said, “I will withdraw me and be quiet,
Why meddle in life’s riot?
Shut be my door to pain.
Desire, thou doest befool me, thou shalt cease.”
But vain the word; vain, vain:
Not in aloofness lieth peace.
He said, “I will submit; I am defeated.
God hath depleted
My life of its rich gain.
O futile murmurings, why will ye not cease?”
But vain the word; vain, vain:
Not in submission lieth peace.
He said, “I will accept the breaking sorrow
Which God tomorrow
Will to His son explain.”
Then did the turmoil deep within him cease.
Not vain the word, not vain;
For in Acceptance lieth peace.4