The Robert Smalls of it
There have been a few times when I could make a golf ball bend to my intent. Standing in the fairway, sensing nothing but temperature, wind, breath, my own heartbeat and my spikes pressing grass, all that existed within me expressed its power through me, my stick and my ball. Just to see, feel, swing and watch the ball in unabated joy captured my confidence.
The moment’s siren song seduced me as reality nagged beneath the joy. Golf is always borrowed.
Sometimes we approach our servant and prayer life as if power emanates from us, entreating God to bend to our way of thinking. It’s a manner not dissimilar from imposing our standard on others or pursuing earthly dreams or talking in third person.
We succumb to the false belief that outcomes belong to us. We say to God, “This is what I want, and this is how I want to achieve it,” and ask God to make it so. We pursue our faith life as though it were a dream life.
Imagine accepting the unthinking conclusions our arrogance offers. A life so lived removes from our existence a real relationship with God, living for anything and everything but him, and living to nothing but ourselves. It is a life inconsistent with God’s good intent. A life in Christ demands more than those misdirected prepositions.
I interject the Robert Smalls story. Robert knew, painfully, the palpable, hollow, guttural despair living life for another person. Robert, until 1861, was a slave working for his master in Charleston, South Carolina. But Robert yearned to live for something, for family and for freedom. Because he had experience as a slave piloting the steamship Planter in Charleston harbor, Robert hatched a plan toward freedom.
As the Planter’s crew and captain slept in town he finalized his plan. On that early 1861 morn, Robert, his family and several fellow slaves, unmoored the steamship and slipped past the garrisons at Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie toward freedom. Courage found its vessel in Robert Smalls. No Charleston seagrass could hide his light or his yearning to live.
I hear the Gospel. I hear Jesus saying, “Live to one another and not have others live for you.”
“Lay down your superiority,” Jesus says. The more I live in Christ, the more I live toward another. The more I live for God, the less I live for another’s standard. It’s a semantic argument. We cannot lay down our life for another until we live to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. I get the subtle difference. I relinquish my cinematic view, the siren song calling upon my arrogance within.
Can anyone dare, as Smalls, to love one another as Christ loved us, to love toward each other as Christ toward us? Who will lay down their arrogance for God’s good intent? Who realizes life is borrowed?