We all at times strain to see the light at the end of a tunnel. We feel that surely, past these particular circumstances, we’ll exit into new realities. The New Yorker cartoon on this page therefore struck a chord even as it caused me to laugh. New Jersey? The long-anticipated, fought-for, longed-for light is, of all things, New Jersey?
It wasn’t the cartoonist’s Manhattan viewpoint that struck me. My mind supplied its own assorted impressions-from Garden State license plates and lovely hills to Camden, where I was born, spent ten good years, and later in adulthood saw its urban decay.
New Jersey or New Glarus, the cartoon has universal resonance. Our hard work and planning may result in “progress,” but the new place we find ourselves-perhaps an expanded or more “significant” ministry-has its own problems. Dorothy Sayers speaks of there not truly being “solutions” to problems, only new realities.
The figure in the cartoon is walking away from “New Jersey.” Where will he go? We have choices, but they’re usually limited. We can step forward into the New Jerseys and live out what is there, or go back to Manhattan and do much the same thing.
I love Eugene Peterson’s book title: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Our lives may be tunnel after tunnel where the only light ends up a New Jersey-a bland, infuriating, challenging, exciting mixture of potential. A New Jersey that becomes, in certain ways, what we make of it.
People in our congregations constantly experience the light at the end of their tunnels as New Jerseys. With Eugene Peterson, we need to help them-and ourselves-perceive the challenge inherent in a great dream becoming a drab reality.
John Sherrill, in the newsletter Intercessors, describes the struggle in praying “for those you don’t like.” He tells how he was asked to pray for a church member named Art but found he couldn’t. He didn’t like Art, and this blocked his prayers.
Then he and his wife, Tib, had a conversation with a nurse named Sylvia. Here’s how Sherrill tells the story:
I asked Sylvia what she found the hardest part of her profession. “That’s easy,” she said. “Sometimes you have to nurse people you don’t like.”
I told Sylvia about my similar problem in intercession. “It’s difficult.”
“I know,” said Sylvia. “And the trouble is you feel guilty because we’re supposed to pray for spiteful people.”
Sylvia told Tib and me two examples of people who had used her spitefully. She once had a lawyer patient who had been shot in the head and who afterwards suffered a personality change. He would shout obscenities at the nurses. “I felt dirty when I walked out of that man’s room,” Sylvia said.
“And there was a woman I once nursed on private duty. She had melanoma. In a few weeks she would probably be dead and yet she wanted to be sure she got her money’s worth out of us nurses. She couldn’t bear to see me sit down.”
Two principles helped her, she said.
First, as a student, she had been trained to be impartial. “We were taught to treat all patients with the same care.” Impartiality. The way God treats us. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:45).
“The second principle is harder but even more helpful,” she said. “I must remember I am here to nurse, not to judge.” Again this principle is based on the way God treats us. The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son (John 5:22).
“There’s a bonus that comes from using these two yardsticks,” Sylvia said. “Once you stop judging, you are free to understand . . .”
After our talk with Sylvia, I once again thought about Art, and I felt ashamed. We can be realistic and clear-eyed about personality weaknesses, yes. But to judge to the point where we cannot intercede? Even the Father did not do that. He left judgment to the Son and the reason seems clear: Jesus Himself walked through the rejections and temptations of life and could identify with our weaknesses.
He had been there. He knew. Within moments I found that I was able to begin a fresh kind of intercession for Art, trusting at the same time that when others interceded for me they could find it in themselves not to judge me first.
Harold L. Myra is president of Christianity Today, Inc.
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
