I was taking a shortcut across campus when I saw her, directly in my path, about 50 yards away. A student – actually, the best student – in one of my freshman English classes. An unusually good writer, and one inclined to think about things a little differently than her peers.
We had gotten to know each other a little, in a few brief after-class conversations. She was studying to be a nurse with the Army, and she had not, as far as I could tell, embraced the faith that so many others of her age at that university professed to follow.
As I approached, she looked to be racing through the seven basic ballet movements – an unusual flurry of little jerks and kicks for one as normally easygoing as she was. I suddenly realized she’d been smoking, and was now trying to hide the cigarette, the smoke, and the smell before I got to her.
I got to her, smiled my best smile, engaged her in brief conversation, and took some care not to let on that I noticed anything nicotinic about her or the air about her. She seemed ill at ease, though, and probably suspected that I was playing along with her pretense. But we parted amiably and nothing more was ever said about it.
But considerably more was thought about it.
Walking on, I realized that the only reason that she’d gone to the trouble of hiding the cigarette was because, for whatever reason, she apparently thought enough of what I thought not to want me to think she was a smoker. Curious, that.
One, because at no point in our English classes could I remember ever having expressed an opinion one way or the other on the inhalation of tobacco.
And two, because – while (what she presumed to be) my opinion clearly mattered enough to her that she didn’t want me thinking she smoked … that opinion did not matter to her enough to keep her from actually smoking.
In other words, what I thought was really important to her – right up to the point where it wasn’t important at all.
I have thought of that incident so many times over the years, and have come to wonder if this is what God puts up with, every day. So many of His children, singing and praying and pledging our faithful love to Him, even as we make plans for the day – even for the next five minutes – that we know will betray that love, ignore His mercies, press on for the booby prize of whatever habit or idol or sin promises greater pleasures.
God is important to us – right up to the point where He isn’t.
“We are too Christian to enjoy sinning,” the famous pastor Peter Marshall once said, “and too fond of sinning really to enjoy Christianity.” We pray and pray for God’s clear will and direction, but in fact, “most of us know perfectly well what we ought to do; our trouble is that we don’t want to do it.”
Another pastor, Robert Robinson, recognized the same stubborn, tiresome phenomenon in himself. In his long-beloved hymn, Come Thou, Fount Of Every Blessing, he wrote of how wonderful it would be not to have to be forgiven for our thoughts and actions, day after day – because we had chosen, instead, to be good. To stop running off every five minutes, like a distracted child … and simply follow.
“O, to grace, how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter (chain),
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O, take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.”
There’s a reason we’re still singing that song, 260 years after Robinson wrote it. Like him, and that young nursing student, and Adam and Eve, hiding in the bushes, there’s something in us that doesn’t want to look up to see God coming. We fear He’ll think less of us, disapprove … even close the doors of heaven before we come running back. But we don’t fear enough not to go.
We don’t, in the end, want to wander off to hell. But in truth, in the meantime, there’s many a day we don’t much mind smelling like we’ve been there.
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