A Meditation on 1 John 2:3-6

It is the most difficult and odious challenge you will ever face in life: to respond as Jesus would have responded, to someone with whom you have a conflicted relationship. Sounds simple, no?

No. It's not simple. It's practically unthinkable to anyone who is steeped in today's culture and psychology to treat someone who has hurt you in exactly the way Jesus would treat someone who hurt Him.

"Let go of people who have hurt you," scream the status updates and Pinterest sayings. "Wish them the best and move on." Or a similar one, "Sometimes you have to let people go because they are toxic to you. Let them go because they take and take and leave you empty. Let them go because in the ocean of life when all you're trying to do is stay afloat, they are the anchor that's drowning you."  And then there's the mantra that one of my coworkers, long ago, cited: "Don't get mad; just get even." This is the stuff that makes sense in today's world. It makes more sense than loving and staying connected to someone who has wronged you. Even when you have committed to following Jesus and want to become like Him, it still feels unthinkable when you consider the ramifications of walking as He walked.

"Jesus, you ask the impossible. You must have meant something else when you said 'Follow Me.' If You meant that I have to keep loving and living with the door open to this hurtful person, well... what were you thinking?  Don't I matter, in this scenario?"

Over and over I cross paths with people who have been deeply hurt by someone, and who respond in completely understandable but death-inflicting ways. It is also my own greatest challenge in life. Let’s admit the bold-faced truth: your knee-jerk response to those who marginalize or hurt you is to distance from that person, to cut them off, to nurse a grudge, to demonize them, to malign their reputation with others, to avoid anything that reminds you of them, to limit your own opportunities in the service of not crossing paths with them, to think of all the angry, snarky and pointed things you wish you could say to them about their attitude, communication patterns or behaviors; to strike back in some way that will hurt them as deeply as they hurt you. Boil that all down to this: at some level you want to kill that person.

This is not the way of Christ.

John, the one whom Jesus loved, the one who on the surface states his case so mildly and sweetly, sends this zinger our way: “The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” (1 John 2:4)

“Wait, wait, John! I have come to know Jesus. He is my Savior and my friend. I spend time with Him just about every day. I talk to Him often through the day. I talk about Him with children, coworkers, friends. I want to be His servant with all my heart. I am NOT a liar. I can be trusted. Truth is welcome in my life.”

“But Child, the truth is this: His command was to love one another as He loves you. Jesus never held anyone at arm’s length. Never turned and walked away from a toxic human being. Never stopped loving. Never ruminated over personal or physical hurts inflicted on Him, even when those were egregious. Never tried to get even with those who would destroy Him. He called nastiness and hypocrisy by its right name, but left the final judgment for the judgment day. This is huge: He always left the door open. He always came back for another conversation. He loved, up close and personal. He stayed available and on the lookout for a heart's leanings toward His Father, even at risk of being maligned and mistreated. Are you doing that? Are you doing it with the person who makes you the maddest, who most upsets you, who's treated you unforgivably, whose evil makes you shrink back, who festers in your consciousness?”

[In a small voice] “No.”

Friends, I just don’t find in the Bible any verses in which Jesus calls on us to be self-protective. None that say we should walk away. None that advise us as to how best to dish out consequences, natural or otherwise, to those who offend us.

He did say to be wise and serpents and harmless as doves. I suppose that we could construe that to mean that we don’t need to make ourselves someone else’s whipping post, target of self-gratification, or object of control. I'm all for removing those things which would enable bad behavior in others. But admittedly this gloss on the text is taken out of context.

“Help me out, Bible writers! There HAS to be something here that speaks up for me and how I’ve been treated, that speaks against the debilitating or demeaning messages someone has dished out on me, that calls down brimstone on those who would squash my worthy endeavors. Shouldn't I be able to insist that someone who has been blind, MUST BE MADE TO SEE? I am not ready to let go of this offense. It's not right. Where’s the justice, where's the call to accountability for those who inflict hurt, and where are the consequences of their deeds?”

Jesus didn’t give us that model. He gave us a model for calling nastiness, manipulative control and hypocrisy by their right names. But we don’t have a model for dishing out judgment, for ruining the offensive person's sense of worth, for killing someone else off, literally or figuratively. We have a model that is Love; non-maudlin, gritty, principled, illogical, every-cell-of-your-body-screams-against-it, vulnerable Love. It’s a model that not only forgives, but keeps the door open and gives someone another chance.

Argh.

I know, it’s plumb crazy.

To John the Beloved: you could not have asked of me anything more difficult than this. You could not. I think I would have to die first.

Postscript: I write from my experience and observations. Yours may be different. While I strongly [and that is not a strong enough adverb to describe how strongly] believe that Jesus is not in favor of cutting people off, I also notice that He did not move in and live with a Pharisee or anyone else who was otherwise abusive.

The "Fat Series" Will Return

I'm not done, and the posts are percolating, so the "Fat Series" will be back. But first, I have other things to post.

Fat, Part 1

With my grandma and my mom, probably about the time I was in 7th grade

[Disclaimer: I'm writing this series to organize some thoughts. There may or may not be insights hiding in here, but if you're interested in the topic, read on.]

"Waaaah, you getting so fat, ah! You never get boyfrien' like dat, lah!" That remark from [the ironically-named] Christian Lee on the badminton court behind our church fell into my world like a proverbial bomb, setting off the conscious phase of a personal war that will probably never be over.

Back in the early 1970s when I was ten or eleven years old, I started becoming aware that I was fat. I don't remember anyone specifically informing me that I was overweight, but in several ways my perception that I had a weight problem took shape and grew. No one person could have designed this collection of thoughts to be quite so insidious and pervasive as it turned out to be. It almost seems like a perfectly evil, orchestrated campaign brought about this sense of unattractiveness, inability to meet an acceptable standard, helplessness and distrust of myself. I will likely struggle with these challenges in my head, barring a miracle, until my dying day.

Let me describe what went into the mix.

Mama, age 14 (around 1940-1941)

First, I suppose, there was my mom's own struggle. She had been a roly-poly child with thick ankles who never saw herself as pretty, although I see in pictures that she was and still is beautiful. Others agree with me, but she never believes it. Not even close. She has fought an ongoing battle with her weight all her life, and at five-foot-four, it has not been an easy one to win. During the year that led up to her wedding, she once told me, she had lost a lot of weight so that she would look slim on her wedding day.

And she did. The pictures show her to have been a little pint of a thing, looking gorgeously "hourglass" in her wedding dress as she stands slightly in front of her handsome Dutchman. But it didn't last. The fight with weight was always on for her.

My parents in 1961

Then there was the issue of my own genes. Being a Caucasian in an Asian world, I literally stood out from the crowd. I was always taller and larger than my local friends. My clothes were always made by a dressmaker, because buying fabric and drawing the designs for the dressmaker was an artistic release and relaxation for my mom. But about the time I became interested in shopping on my own terms, I realized that I not only was a living mannequin for my mom's hobby, I had to have my clothes custom made because I couldn't fit any ready-made clothing in the shops. And not only did I wear dressmaker-sewn clothes--including swimsuits--but my feet grew to a size six, then seven, then eight, and I had to have my shoes made as well. Fortunately there was a good shoemaker in our city. But all of this set me apart, and left me feeling just plain big.

Asians love western-style weddings and often included the missionary kids in those occasions at our church, but I never got to be the flower girl. Ever. I was just too tall, too big. My petite little friend Julia always got to carry the basket and drop the petals, and to pose prettily in the pictures with the wedding party. After Julia moved away it was some other little girl. I topped out at a height of 5'9" in the eighth grade. Even before I reached my full height, I could watch parades go by just by standing in the back and looking over the heads of grown Asian adults. In choir photos at church I stood in the back row. In singing groups I stood in the middle so that people could stair-step down from me. My 8th grade teacher, a sweet Chinese woman just out of teacher training, was half as big as me. That's just how it was.

Second from the left, in 8th grade at 5'9". My brother passed me up in height that year.
That's our teacher standing in front of us.

And so the realization expanded that I was big. And heavy. And fat. I can painfully see how this affected me, looking back at a cartoon I drew of myself in the eighth grade. My schoolmates are drawn as stick figures, and me... I drew myself as a hippo.

The reminders were always there at home, as well. My dad is a natural critic, and I remember him saying to me when he noticed me biting my fingernails, "What's the matter? You still hungry?" Looking back on that, I realize my dad meant it to be about my nail-biting (I really believe this, because I can't remember him ever once saying anything about my mom's weight). But I heard the second question loud and clear.

And then there was that one memorable phrase of a song by Carole King. Let me set the scenario:

At the back of our house was a servant's quarters, a small long room with a "squat pot bathroom" behind the door at the far end. After our servant Cecilia died of stomach cancer my dad turned her room into a spare room where the TV was kept, along with a bunk bed. My dad renamed it The Doghouse. We kids, including any neighbor kids or friends from our church youth group, would pile into that little Doghouse sitting several on a bunk, and watch TV (which wasn't much because there were only about two hours of English programming in a day in Malaysia). We watched "Wonderful World of Disney" and "The Waltons" if we were choosing well, and "Scooby-Doo" or "Thriller" if we weren't.

I remember one afternoon when I jumped off the top bunk to the floor with a thump. My "Chinese brother" Sam busted out, singing, "I feel the earth...move...under my feet...." I felt embarrassment hit me like a physical punch in the stomach, and could almost imagine the crack in the cement floor where I had landed. I slunk out of the Doghouse and back to the main part of our house to do something else.

Char Kway Teow (photo from the web). One of my favorite dishes, growing up.

Then there's just that wonderful taste of delicious food. Good food and fusion cuisine is extremely important where I grew up on Penang island. International foodie magazines now cite my home island as a foodie heaven. Don't I know it? The food I grew up eating was varied and wonderfully tasty. I could eat a couple of bowls of Lucky Charms for breakfast and then chow down on a whole delicious plate of  piled-up fried rice or char kway teow (wide rice noodles with soy sauce, bits of scrambled egg and veggies) over a lunch break from school. After watching badminton in the evening I could pop over to the night market and get some of those sweet rice treats that were for sale at the food stalls, such as the sweet glutinous rice topped with a coconut and brown sugar topping and wrapped in pandan leaves.

And then there are those blatant comments. Asians are remarkably frank about size. They will tell you when you've gotten fatter (as if you couldn't read your scales or see yourself in the mirror), and when you've lost weight. At least, that's how it was in Malaysia. They still do it to me to this day, right here in California when we get together for Malaysian potlucks. My American self hates the comments ("You looking more fat now, ah"; "You lose weight or somet'ing?"), and my Asian self says, "Ah well; this is just how Malaysians are."

Case in point: As I have been drafting this post, I spotted a comment from one of my childhood friends posted on a picture I took of her brother last May.  "Wah, Johnny. Did you put on weight since last year? I saw you just last year."  On Facebook. In front of everyone. See what I mean?

That upper right-hand package is unfortunately familiar

And then there were the pills, around the time I was twelve. My mom started taking them as a desperate measure to get her own weight down. With both parents being medical doctors, I had no sense of prohibition about pill-taking. Pills are a tool for helping when you need something fixed in your body, right? I don't recall if my mom noticed I was getting pudgy, or if I complained to her about it. But I remember standing by the sliding door in her bathroom, and her handing me some of her pills, and saying that I could try them and see if that would help me manage my appetite and eat less. So I did take them, for a while.

One might be horrified at my mom's actions particularly in light of her role as a doctor, but please remember that this was the early 70s, she and I were both concerned about my weight, and she didn't want me to have to fight that same unending battle she had fought all her life. Things were different in those days about quiet shame and body image, different about the regulations on medications, and different in all kinds of other ways. Who knew in those days that the Fenfluramine she and I were taking would be later be tied to heart valve disease, pulmonary hypertension and cardiac fibrosis?

Here's how they advertised it on the back of a postcard from those days (found on eBay)

I don't recall whether I felt more full or ate any less while taking the pills . . . or whether I lost weight, for that matter. Perhaps I lost a little. The pills had a side effect of making some people drowsy, and they certainly did that to my little twelve-year-old self. Never one to like naps, I got drowsy in school, and the kids would tease me about it. One of them even made a remark or two after we were adults and crossed paths again. "Remember when you were taking Ponderax and you'd fall asleep on your desk?" I winced. Thanks, Tim.

A couple of months ago I did a baseline treadmill test to establish where my cardiac health stands now that I'm in my early fifties. I figured my heart wasn't in any trouble, but since my mom had double bypass surgery eight years ago at the age of eighty, I thought it would be smart to do this. I passed with flying colors. But the cardiologist told me that there was evidence of a benign heart valve issue. I need not worry about it, he added quickly. Sure. These heart valve things are just something that happen with no particular explanation, right? It wasn't until I was writing this post that I wondered: might that benign murmur have something to do with the Ponderax?