THIS RELEASE FROM any situation through grace is the most open door to man out of his dilemmas and predicaments I know, or anybody knows. It stretches from a man with straps around him in an electric chair to a highly respectable vice president of an insurance company suffering from severe headaches over a period of years. He was a highly moral man, driven by duty to be good. There was a tinge of the perfectionist in him; he wanted to be perfectly good. He was a good moral man, but his striving for goodness would not allow him to get a firsthand contact with God, and it built up a wall between himself and his wife. They couldn’t get close to each other. There was a strange barrier. He was in the hands of a psychiatrist for three and a half years, three times a week, at thirty-five dollars a sitting, with little or no result.
Pagan psychiatry could not probe the real reason, and if it had probed it could not have remedied it. It was this, as his wife whispered it to me before I saw him, “It’s his wrong view of religion.” He was striving to be good under the lash of duty. He was trying to climb the ladder to God to find Him on the topmost rung of worthiness—the egocentric attempt at salvation. I told him of the other way, in which God comes down the ladder to us in Incarnation, in Jesus, and meets us, not at the topmost rung, but at the bottom-most rung as sinners. There we are humble enough to empty our hands of our self-striving and self-righteousness and take the gift of God. “It’s too simple,” he exclaimed in incredulity. He took it, and when we rose from our knees his face was a sunrise. He stood up the next day and announced that his headaches were gone.
O divine Redeemer, whether I have a black cap over my head or a band of aches around my head, it is the same. Thou art the Savior whether I’m in an electric chair or on a psychiatrist’s couch. Thou art the Savior—let that suffice me. I thank Thee. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Anything that makes me tense and anxious is un-Christian. The Christian way is the way of surrender and faith and trust.
