Preserving My Unedited Thoughts

It could become a sermon: William Bulger, President of the University of Massachusetts, is a controversial New Englander to say the least. He is very, very smart. For example he gave a large part of his presidential inaugural address in Latin. Should I have been in his place, I’d have been happy to give my speech in reasonably good English.

Bulger, the Boston Globe says, once wrote: “The older we get, it seems, the more wondrous becomes the theater of our memory. It is often suffused with a merciful magic that smoothes the rough edges of the past.”

Embedded in that beautiful prose is a provocative truth: our memories are not that reliable. Perhaps each of us possesses an internal editor who rewrites the stories of our pasts so that we can more conveniently live with them. My editor is amazing. He makes my past achievements look better, my past sins seem less onerous, and my past decisions more rational.

This internal editor of mine is more elusive than Osama bin Laden. He has the infinite recesses of my soul in which to hide. In the short run he makes me feel good; in the long run he causes me to become spiritually delusional.

My favorite example of this kind of editing? Aaron, Moses’ brother, explaining the golden calf: “Really hard to say what happened, Moses. We had some silver and gold and I dropped it all in this big pot, and poof! Frankly, we were as surprised as you are when we saw what came out.”

I have learned the hard way to control this rogue editor of mine through immediate and ongoing repentance (I’m thinking David here), the cultivation of a close community of friends who know my stories (Samuel/Saul; Elijah/Ahab; Daniel/Nebuchadnezzar), and a disciplined life of journaling (pages which do not lie—if I do not lie to them).

Discovered at Borders: Phillip Gulley whose three books—Home to Harmony, Just Shy of Harmony and Signs and Wonders—easily rival the humor of Bill Bryson or Garrison Keillor. My wife, Gail, and I have had a thousand great laughs this summer as we have read these together. Gulley’s latest book, If Grace is True, is a far more serious book that pushes the theological envelope quite dramatically for evangelicals.

Conversations like these get my attention: At lunch a couple of weeks back, a man I greatly respect (age 60 this month) responds to my question, “What’s God been saying to you since we were last together?” He says, “I’ve spent my whole life running, achieving. You know me—I’ve been a hammer, and everyone else has been the anvil. I’ve tried to fill every moment with something to do. I’ve always been telling God what I wanted … what I thought He should be doing. But now I’m learning that praying is as much about listening and waiting as all my previous talking. And each time I’ve listened, and each time I’ve waited, God has done something—small or large—that has left me breathless and aware of how much I’ve missed in all my busyness.”

Solon, the ancient Greek, wrote of himself, “Each day he grew older and learned something new.” He sounds like my lunch friend.

On small things history turns: Henry Kissinger: “Can you imagine what Nixon would have been had somebody loved him? … He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him” (from Stephen Ambrose’s Comrades).

From my bookshelf: “The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him—and of her. In all her prayers and labor this should have first place. We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past. This will prove of greater value to them than anything that art or science can devise. (A.W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy)

Here’s an interesting idea for a contest. An essay: 3,000 words—Put yourself in Tozer’s place if he were to come back today, forty years after his death, and spend the next year visiting well-known churches, attending the better-known seminars and conferences, reading the better-known Christian authors. What would he preach about? What would he write? Where would he wish to go and restart his ministry?

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