Spencer's Mom

Except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

The 2021 Spencer Macleod Memorial Three Point Shoot Out

 

The crowd

Bap, bap, bap...the sound of a basketball hitting pavement still gives me a strange sense of comfort. I am transported back to gymnasiums, the squeak of sneakers on the floor, the shriek of a ref’s whistle. Though my eyes never left my child, eventually I learned the 10 rules, and caught on to many of the endless sub-rules, say for dribbling.  No traveling, double-dribbling and watch the clock – you have 5 seconds to pass.

All three of my sons played to some degree. Spencer, the oldest, quit high school and sports with it, but was instrumental in mentoring and encouraging his younger brother Miles through his high school career. Miles played into college. Jake, ten years younger and several inches taller, played into high school but stepped down so he could focus on God’s direction for his life. Many times, I could hear one of them approaching home as daylight faded. Bap…bap…bap. It’s a simple relationship between a boy and his ball.

So it made sense when the Yarmouth police chief introduced the idea of a memorial for Spencer at the Old Town House basketball courts. It was 2004, two years past his murder and all of the court proceedings had finally wrapped up. The Yarmouth police recognized Spencer as a hero, someone who gave his life for another, so plans were made.

I remember it was blustery cold, but the two courts were crowded that day. Police and firemen stood in uniform. Detectives, ex-thugs, my pastor, friends and family, church folks, the assistant DA and Sue O’Leary from the Victim Witness office all mingled together on a chilly fall day. We served cookies and hot cider and a group from church rapped a song Spencer wrote.

“This is a message to my heavenly Father

Who picked me up when I was helpless, broken – I needed shelter.”

As the leaves skittered across the courts and the trees tossed in the wind, God was there, moving among the people, finding just the right place in each heart to press upon. He was there to hold a broken mother, to point up and say “Look!” It was no ordinary celebration. When Jesus is in on it, all heaven will rejoice.

Bap…bap…bap. It’s July 1 2021. I’m sitting on one of the two stone benches that flank the stone memorial for Spencer. Miles and Jake are shooting around on the court, their wives and children are close by. Miles has announced that it is the 2021 Spencer Macleod Memorial Three Point Shoot Out. If you didn’t know, there were 13 of them, each year growing larger and expanding from a few guys passing the hat for the winner, to racks and refs and grand prizes, not to mention free raffle give-a-ways. Last year was a Covid casualty. This year was a combination of a tired director (my husband) and it landing on the edge of everything suddenly opening. Anyway, it wasn’t happening. Until now.

  Flyer from 2018

It’s one of those quirky things in a mom who’s lost a child. Like the shoebox my mom carried for fifty years with my brother’s soldier, Christmas stocking and First Place ribbon he won at a field day right before he died at age nine. I get it now. I carry my own “box,” real (yes, there is a box in the attic now almost 20 years later of Spencer’s things I can’t toss out) and imagined. I imagine he will be always remembered, always a hero, always the gentle young man who loved others the way Jesus does. Grace upon grace.  But people grow up, move, change…even forget. Time has no mercy, but allows us memories, like souvenirs.

I don’t know whether my sons consciously realize it, this sometimes painful processing that I do, although less often now. The quirkiness. They are grown and changed too. Men that still love the game, even though they laugh at their waning endurance on the court. Men that still love their brother.

 

The ball hits the backboard and bounces into the hoop.

“You still have a great shot, Jake,” Miles says. And I know that still means a lot to his not so little brother.

“Okay,” Miles announces as he stands at the three-point line, “for the 2021 Spencer Macleod Three Point Shoot Out, whoever gets the next three-pointer wins.” As he is still speaking, he shoots, and the ball swishes through the basket. I’m pretty sure he did not expect it and we shout and cheer. The grandkids are climbing on the memorial stone and laughter fills the air. Time slows down long enough for me to pull this all in and hold the moment. Did you know that God was right there again? You may even wonder if Jesus likes basketball and I think it could be true. All I know is 2021 may go down as one of the best three-point shootouts ever. But what does a mom know? Except that her kids are the best.

Cousins

 

The Advocate

The door swings open, and I follow the young Victim Services Advocate into the parole hearing room. She’s young and pregnant with her first baby, a girl she said, after she realized it was okay to talk about everyday things with me. She had to keep me separate, in a small conference room with windows and a water cooler until the hearing began and there was not much to say although she warned me that I would hear details of my son’s murder.

            David’s family and “supporters” are separated to the right of the wood paneled room, watching me enter. A rail runs down the middle of the seats that face the parole board, and I am ushered to the left, where I sit flanked by the nice advocate. I notice a large man with a square-shaped head, thick ruddy features, like he’s from Southie. He blocks the door, actually fills the door, then I look to the left and see three more guards, wearing sweaters, to look less threatening is my guess, but you can see the bulge around the belt from weapons and walkie talkies.

            I lean back in my seat, to wave at David’s family. I had spoken to his mom for the first time ever, two nights ago. She called, nervous. “I was scared to call you – I felt ashamed.” When you touch murder, no matter which side you stand on, you get dirty. It has been 17 and a half years since we were all changed in some horrific way. I remembered watching David’s mom at his trial, the angry footsteps, the voice shrill and desperate. Then the father, slumped over on a bench outside the courtroom, the loss bearing down. I had my own pain, a demanding, consuming house-guest I could not shake. I had been treading just above the rising current of a dark and violent nightmare for over a year and i was exhausted. My son was dead, the innocent victim of a senseless murder. There was little else I could think about then.

            David and Rodolfo, another teenager charged with Spencer’s murder, pled guilty to Second Degree murder. They had just watched their friend get sent away for life without parole and decided a guilty plea to a lesser charge was safer. They stood shackled, facing me, as I told them I forgave them. It probably didn’t count for much at that moment. Twenty years. That meant their whole life then – two boys from Cape Cod headed to a maximum state prison. Survival might’ve mattered more.  I was numb with grief; my forgiveness was a reflex, an act of obedience I never questioned or pieced apart. I would not have had the strength or mental acuity. I just obeyed the same Jesus who forgave me.

            The door on the opposite side of the room opened and more guards, then David wearing a crisp blue shirt with a tie and khaki pants. He was shackled, hands and feet. He told me he would be shackled and unable to look at me when we talked the week before. His father’s hair was white now, and his mother wasn’t angry anymore, but had the soft worry lines that carve across a mother’s heart. His sister tried to walk over to my side, to hug me, but was instantly blocked by two guards and I had to remember that a parole room is often a place of visceral and sudden rage. But today, God was there. He was Hope to the convict’s family, Salvation to the soul of the young man shackled.  He was there to open the eyes of those who could not see.

            I had five minutes to speak, the only voice of the Victim’s side of the hearing, but I spoke for Spencer’s family, and for Spencer too. I said we forgive, I said let God continue to use the ground where Spencer fell, bringing forth life from death. Redemption – only He can do this. I couldn’t see anyone except for the parole board, but I could feel my words finding a place to settle in each heart. When I stood to go back to my seat, I noticed the big square guard had become very animated. He was nodding his head at me, then he winked. A minute later, he gave a thumbs up. I could see the side of David’s face and it was wet from tears.

             I was ushered back out as the Victim Advocate spoke to more guards on her walkie-talkie and then was led down the stairs. The big guard followed closely and waited as I checked out at the window on the ground floor.

“I’ve worked here for 17 years,” he said, then he paused, searching. “I’ve never heard anything like that.” His eyes looked puffy and wet. He smiled. “You are amazing.”

            “No!” I shot back, shaking my head. “I’m not. God is amazing!” Then I noticed an older gentleman to my right, who I had not seen, with thick white neatly combed hair and sparkling clear blue eyes that matched his tie. He was nodding and laughing softly, pointing upward. Then the guard saw him too and said,

            “Oh yes! Of course!” 

            I am not amazing at all. I am Mary Magdalene, or the woman sitting in the dirt, surrounded by outraged men with fists clutching stones as Jesus writes in the sand beside me. “He who is without sin…” Who can stand?

            Sometimes people say, “How could you do that? How could you forgive?” Because murderers stand under the same fountain of Grace that I do. The black grime and stain of my sin was not a better or easier sin. It costs Jesus the same price.

            Outside the breeze rattles the tired late summer leaves, David’s family and friends gather in a loose circle, relieved, breathing in hope and the sweet cool morning air. I hug some more people then leave, relieved to be alone. I have an hour before Rodolfo’s hearing and I have to eat.

            I pick a small table at Wendy’s with the most sunlight streaking across the  top and open up my salad and chili, thinking about the parole hearing, how God has again kept me and I’m grateful, so very grateful.

He shall cover you with His feathers, And under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler. Psalm 91:4
            The tables around me fill with office workers, sales clerks, old men who eat slow and look out the window and a young mother with a stern voice and small children who don’t pay attention. I thought of the pregnant Victim Advocate – how her life would change soon and it would be a good thing to be away from the violence, the outrage, the wounds that never heal.

            Then I thought of the little man with the blue eyes, almost turquoise it seemed and how they danced. He never spoke, I realized; he didn’t have to.

             I wonder if he was an angel…I thought as I finished my lunch and got up to leave, to head back to the Massachusetts Parole Board. It would not surprise me one bit. He was a spark of Joy in the midst of an endless sorrow, pointing to Christ, the true Advocate – the One who sits on both sides of the rail. I am not at all amazing, but my Jesus surely is.

 

Beautiful song by Selah : There Is a Fountain

 

 

 

 

 

Set Apart – Not All Set

Jesus People 1970’s

 

“Quench not the Spirit.” 1 Thessalonians 5:19

Sanctification: 1. to set apart to a sacred purpose: Consecrate 2:to free from sin: Purify

This word popped into my mind as I made my way through the woods this morning, lifting my concerns before God. “Sanctified.” But then what God spoke next was disturbing. “They will not be sanctified.” Specifically, believers – I was praying for one in particular who I see as a bit adrift.  I’ve tried to call her in, to reason with her and she hears me, but she does not “heed.”  I don’t think she sees it as obstinacy or rebellion.  She is surrounded by a cloud of other compromised Christians and a group-think of postmodern plurality and half-truths.

        I’ve been making my way through the Bible over the last six months and I’m now in 2nd Kings. After several chapters, you pick up a pattern. Two kingdoms, Israel and Judah with two kings, their reigns overlapping throughout the course of each nation’s chaotic history. Some kings were flat-out evil, laughing at a God they assumed was blind.  Then there were the good kings. They usually had to tear down what the bad kings built. They wanted to please God, but I noticed a disturbing trend with these kings. The Bible states,  “but they did not remove the high places.”

        The “high places” refers to altars that were built to worship strange pagan gods. Solomon’s compromise, as he tried to appease way too many women, led to building pagan altars, a split kingdom and two nations veering off track. An occasional king would tear these places down in order to restore his people back to God, but then the next king would build it again.

        I thought of this as I circled the pond this morning. Sanctified means “set apart.” Not set on a fence, straddling two worlds. If I had to define what disturbs me most about many millennial Christians I meet is a disregard for what is holy. They won’t tear down the High Places.  They want to dine at the King’s banquet wearing flip-flops and pajamas.

Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD your God. Leviticus 20:17

        I know what you’re thinking. Doesn’t Jesus love me just the way I am? Well, it depends. Any wretched sinner, no matter how filthy, who is repentant, is welcome to eat at His table. Come as you are! But when I should know better, when I should be eating meat and I’m still on the bottle, when I know the Truth but fail to speak or live it… I better get it right. “Quench not the spirit.” If I just ate a box of bavarian creme donuts (I did that once when I was slightly impaired) I will pass on an invitation to dinner. All set.

       Dietrrich Bonhoeffer said, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

        When you get as old as I am, you begin to see cycles. As Solomon lamented, there truly is nothing new under the sun, including the “postmodern” philosophy. As a child of the 60’s, our mantra was  “if it feels good do it.” Why not? We weren’t hurting anyone! But unlike today, we would’ve proudly admitted our rebellion and rejection of all things holy. We built the altars ourselves and partied into the looming darkness. The hangover was immense and the whole nation suffered. Strange that the Jesus People Movement was born out of the midst of this depravity, yet so just-like-Jesus.  

        “A false scale is an abomination to the Lord.” Proverbs 11:1. I read this today, and I know it is talking about a literal scale, but I sensed the Holy Spirit highlighting it before me. What is my false scale? How am I weighing in on sanctification, holiness and the standard that God expects of me? A false scale is a deceptive scale. Do we also think our God is blind?

Much will be required of everyone who has been given much. And even more will be expected of the one who has been entrusted with more. Luke 12:48

         I have been given much – much more than I ever deserved or could even ask for. I want to tear down any lurking High Places and come to His holy altar –repentant, hungry for more of Jesus, abandoning all.  Oswald Chambers says, “Am I prepared to let God grip me by His power and do a work in me that is worthy of Himself?”

        This is the cost of sanctification. It is not cheap. But I want to be set apart for my Master’s use, so that when He needs me, He can joyfully reach for me.

        Perhaps the “Postmodern age” will signal a new revival, a resurgence of the Truth the Way and the Life.  If God is looking for some Jesus People, will we be ready? Worshippers in Spirit and in truth or worshipping before strange gods? Let’s demolish the High Places and return to our first love. There is a fountain of grace at the altar of repentance.

 

” but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.”1 Peter 1:15-17 (NKJV)

 

 

O Come to the Altar – beautiful song!

 

And A Lot of Patience

Waiting…

 

If you are really a Cape Codder, you will never admit that the weather is good – at least without adding a disclaimer like, “What a beautiful day! But tomorrow it’s supposed to rain/snow/hail…” True to my 40 years of being what is called a “wash-a-shore” on this sand bar, I will declare that this winter was really…not bad. We had a couple of slushy snowfalls and dustings, some frigid days but hey, it is New England. However, the spring seems to be stuck in March, reluctantly edging over the 40’s, maybe popping into the 50’s on a rare occasion. This IS the Cape, where the icy Atlantic grips 100 miles of shore, stalling out the release of new life from trees and flowers that are clamped down, waiting.

            Forty years ago almost to this day, a young woman left New Jersey, which had exploded in vibrant color and life, and chugged north in a rusted out Volkswagen bus. A steamer trunk with all she owned was shoved into the back with some peacock feathers thrown on top. A down sleeping bag that had been well used for several years was tossed in last minute, just in case.

            She had only been to Cape Cod once, a few weeks earlier in March, and it was cold, sleeting. “Sea frost” someone called it and it sounded mystical and poetic which drew her even more. She crossed the bridge over the canal somewhere in the afternoon and drove until she could find the ocean, then parked overlooking the gray green palette of sea, dotted with whitecaps, stretching into the empty horizon and she felt like she had arrived. She took out her notebook and wrote. But she became aware of a chilling wet cold, much colder than New Jersey and beyond the shelter that the old bus and sleeping bag would provide, so she pushed on – to Wellfleet. There, kismet led her to a tiny cottage near the bay. There was no heat or hot water, but a small wood stove would warm up the little room quickly and the stove could heat up a pan of water for bathing. As the sky turned dark, the peepers rang out across the marsh. Spring is here, they said. Close, anyway. Close enough, I thought, as I pulled the dirty sleeping bag over my head.

            Forty years. I am 63 now, and as I look back to that strange girl, I can hear the peepers and smell the salt mixed with pine on the breeze coming up over the marsh. I can remember how my heart needed to run, to keep looking, and the temporary peace I found next to the ocean, with the world and all of it’s confusion behind me. I don’t remember feeling cold, or dirty or worried at all – I had enough money for beer and cigarettes. I had no phone so I would rely on the mail and that was sufficient for someone who really just wanted to be left alone. Yet I craved more than I had. I craved a higher place than survival, a wider purpose – to be filled with more than anger, doubt and a prevailing sense of brokenness.  Maybe it’s here, I would think, looking out over the bay.  Something that could grow and thrive. I wanted to trust in Hope, but Jack Daniels was safer, easier.

            Seven years later, I ran into Jesus. I’d like to say that He wrapped His arms around me and gave me a big bear hug, but that’s not at all how it went. First, I had to die. And since I was literally almost dead from doing things my way, it wasn’t a big stretch to surrender my will, my pride and my mess.

“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal. John 12:24-25 (MSG)  

              It takes some time for things to grow. At the jail every week I talk to the ladies in green or yellow jumpsuits. Sometimes I get a room full of silence. The expressions can run from bland civility to deadpan to rolling eyes, smirking or smoldering contempt. But the best part of it all is the day I see a spark – so small, you would miss it if you weren’t paying attention. It’s in the eyes and it’s called Hope. And I know once I see the spark, God can build a fire.

            “The cross,” I said, “is a place that represents death and the darkest despair yet also leads the way to hope and freedom and new life.” When I asked for their thoughts, one young woman leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling.

            “This is really deep,” she said and a low rumble of acknowledgement went around the room. She was so right. This truth must penetrate right to the core of our soul. There it will take root, and if we are patient, something wondrous will begin to grow.

            My grandson Eli discovered this first hand after I gave him a terrarium for Christmas. On the cover, you see a tropical paradise bursting from a transparent vase. What you get is a bag a dirt and a small plastic container. A four-year-old has faith to move mountains, but it’s also short-lived. After a few days, he forgot about the dirt. Then a couple of weeks later I got a Facetime call.

“Ama! ” he shouted, his little body trembling with excitement, “LOOK!”

And there it was – well, not exactly paradise, more like ordinary grass, but it was green and growing and so amazing he could barely speak. When I asked him what the secret was, he told me proudly, “A little light, a little water, and a LOT of patience!” Ah, patience!

            Funny that I chose a Cape Cod April as my season to land here. I was as cold and unfriendly as the unforgiving earth. But there was promise just below the surface. I wonder…does Jesus see the small seed of Hope beneath the crusted heart? Maybe He put it there long ago, and is just waiting. Sometimes I think he calls us right to the crossroads of Nowhere-Left-To-Go and Nothing-To-Lose. Let it go – the life that is mine to begin with. Give it to me and I will breathe on it and you will really live.

            I heard the peepers last week, and something in my heart leapt. The young woman I can still see in my mind is an old woman now with joints that are failing and silver strands through my hair. Someone asked me if I was in remission last week, and it took me a moment to realize she meant from cancer. “Well, I’m still here!” I answered. But I thought of another Remission – the forgiveness of my sins, the cancelled debt that was paid for in blood. As I walk through a life that flourishes with the beauty of a heavenly hope, may I never forget the cross, and the deep, unsearchable Love that gave me life, real life.  And the best is yet to come.

Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us.  This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary. Hebrews 6:18-19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQy4NUZKIeM

 

 

 

The Way to Wellness

 

             The pain awakened me. My feet were throbbing, and the ache reached up to the back of my knees. I lay still trying to figure this out, then realized as I readjusted my body that my back, neck and head hurt too. I remembered swimming in Nantucket Sound a few days earlier. God am I that old? I sighed and lifted my pounding head from the pillow, slid out of bed, and limped into the bathroom. I can find the Tylenol and open the child-proof cap without even being conscious.

            It wasn’t until that evening, when my clothes felt like they were on fire that I realized I was sick, not just sore. Then the shaking chills. I fumbled around for a thermometer. 101.7. I gulped some more Tylenol and went to bed. It was a restless night but I awoke free from fever, although not from the pain. I called my doctor.

            “Hold on,” the secretary said flatly after hearing my story, punctuated by, I have never had a fever that high! for dramatic effect. When she came back on the line she said, “The doctor said, ‘You’re a nurse. You know if you’re sick.'”

            I do? This was my first thought. Because historically I am pathetically unaware of my physical well-being, until my body just drops and quits. I’m a great nurse for you but like most nurses, detached from the signals and sirens going off inside my own body.

            Someone had to tell me when I was pregnant, when I was turning yellow from eating bad shellfish, when I should consider that I might have a concussion. I don’t like to spend time inside of myself. It just never seems beneficial.

            There’s a plus side to my ignorance. My husband marvels at my ability to deflect “vain imaginations,” my resilience under pressure and a forward drive that prevents a morbid preoccupation with inward scrutiny. I stunk at meditating in the 70’s. At a yoga class I took a few years ago, I started giggling then had to leave when the instructor told us to be “mindful.” It sounded like Dali Lama meets Miss Manners.

            But there’s also the flip side. A lack of self-awareness can lead to self-deception; perhaps nothing evil or even un-Godly, but I can easily slide into my old comfy self-reliant shoes – the ones with well-worn scriptures and broken-in prayers.

            Then he said to them, “You like to appear righteous in public, but God knows your hearts. What this world honors is detestable in the sight of God.” Luke 16:15

            Yikes! Detestable? Let me look at another translation… how about “abominable?”

            I recovered from my sickness of unknown origin after six days and felt like I was coming out of general anesthesia. I had lost time, so my natural course of action was to catch-up and get busy. Then one morning early in prayer, I heard God speak to me very clearly. He said this:

            “Don’t take Me lightly.”

            It startled me – it was a warning, just short of a rebuke, and I knew I had to spend some time looking inside, and at how the inside was manifesting outside. I had to take my spiritual temperature.

            Charles Finney wrote in the 1850’s about negative morality – how Christians are inclined to settle for just being good people. We don’t curse, don’t smoke, don’t hurt others. We are nice Christians, assimilating into the mainstream of life, but if we are just good, not sanctified, we stink like last week’s garbage. We become hollow trophies, relics of dead religion and social injustice programs – applauded by mankind and the devil. Detestable to God.

            What was my remedy? Repentance first. I had been “esteeming the things of God lightly” – foremost, my relationship with Him. I had been rushed, distracted, malnourished from “lite” prayer, lazy grazing in His word, genuflecting before His throne room of grace. I felt ashamed. My temperature was lukewarm at best, but in the public eye I spoke eloquently, laughed easily and even loved well. But was it His love, or mine? Could I have loved if they hated me or my Jesus? Or if I speak Truth, not just what someone wanted to hear? Can I rejoice in suffering, when what I think is rightly mine, is taken by a just and sovereign God? I knew all this, but I had begun to take it lightly. We are pulled from the flames of hell, redeemed and set free by a brutal death on a cross and clothed in heavenly righteousness. How can I ever take that lightly? A Love far greater than anything I could return? Yet I was treading softly down the well-worn path of neutral Christianity.

            My worship was indeed sick; not dying or dead but just sick enough to make me useless, just like the fever that haunted me for six days, wearing me out, weakening my reserve. I still functioned, but I was hollow and ineffective. Salt without saltiness, a flame without warmth.

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…” ― C.S. Lewis,  The Screwtape Letters           

            I thank God for His warning, that He loves us enough to say, “STOP!” Since that day, I’ve noticed all the places where I can worship Him “in spirit and in truth,” not just in lip-service and the “dont’s”. At work, when a patient’s call light is on again, at home, when my husband who never asks needs to know how much I love him, or looking at the night sky studded with every star my God has named. Funny – once I started looking for places to worship Him, my joy returned. Playing the piano, walking the dog, talking to Jesus before I close my eyes at night. I feel renewed, and so very loved. Thanks, Lord, for pulling me back in, close to You.

Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
My lips shall praise You.
 Thus I will bless You while I live;
I will lift up my hands in Your name.
When I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches.
 Because You have been my help,
Therefore in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice. Psalm 63:3-7

 

 

Go Again

Hello friends!

I am delighted to post a guest blog from one of my favorite people on earth – my son, Miles Macleod. This is a beautiful, timely message that really resonated with some of the deep stirrings that God is bringing to the surface in my own life. I know you will enjoy it too! 

Miles starting out in Ghana, 2004.

Go Again

Several months ago, my pastor preached from the Book of Hosea. The story goes something like this: Hosea, a respected prophet, is told by God to marry the neighborhood prostitute, Gomer. Despite Hosea’s best efforts to change her behavior through love and mercy, Gomer remains unrepentant. She repeatedly runs away to the homes of other men, leaving Hosea humiliated. His humiliation only grows, I imagine, when God tells him to go and retrieve his disgraceful wife in the opening lines of chapter 3: “And the LORD said to me, “Go again…’”

The story is meant to represent the relationship between God and Israel. Through a Christian lens, the story also embodies Jesus’ relationship with his church. We run. He retrieves. Repeat.

The sermon made me uncomfortable. My own story of salvation, 20 years of running and returning, shares many similarities with the story’s foil. I am Gomer with a better name. But that’s not what made me uneasy. I am well aware of my Gomer-like faith and my tendency to worship at the altar of my own agenda. Sadly, I am even comfortable in this role. I, the sinner. God, the redeemer. What made me uncomfortable, then, was something else. I wasn’t sure at the time, but I know it now: it was the redemptive call of Christ. Whereas God of the Old Testament pleads with the people of Israel to stop being a bunch of Gomers, Christ demands that His people become a bunch of Hoseas:

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:22-24).

___________

Teaching is a great profession. I really mean it. I have been doing it for nearly a decade, and there is a lot I love about it. It is especially great for masochists and Christians. In addition to all the benefits, like summers off and working with teens, there is ample opportunity to answer God’s command to “Go again.” On normal days, students want to fall asleep whenever I talk. On the more memorable ones, they might swear at me, flip over a desk at me, or tell their parents on me. Two of them even wanted me dead; I know because they told me so.

If you don’t teach, don’t worry. There are probably still people that hate you. If not, there are certainly those that mock you, that make you look bad, that find pleasure in your pain, or just like to see you wrong. No? Well certainly, there has to be someone that makes you feel awkward, that gives you the heebie-jeebies, or someone whose company you just can’t stand to keep. Or maybe you have children? If they are like mine, they are sometimes ungrateful and rude and selfish and loud and ungrateful and petty and lazy and ungrateful and mean. Did I mention they can be ungrateful?

Here’s my point. We are constantly sinned against. And if you are like me – stubborn and prideful – you do what I do – refuse to be made the fool. Seven years ago, when my principal observed my class for the first time, he gave me two words of advice: less sarcasm. Thanks Sherlock.

Seven years later, I still get defensive when I am wronged. And seven years later, God is still waiting for me stop being such a Gomer.

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I’m not the one who said those awful things. He crossed the line. I will be the bigger person and treat him fairly – that is what I am paid to do – but I am not gonna go out of my way to help him.

Go again.

I hold the door open for every person, I clean up their trash, I take time out of my weekends just to serve them, and I can’t even get a single thank you. Not even the pastor says thank you.

Go again.

I don’t mind being nice to her. I will even watch her dog if she needs me to. But she smells like an ashtray and cusses like a sailor; I can’t have her over for dinner around my kids.

Go again.

He was only supposed to stay a night, and it’s been three weeks, and he doesn’t do anything to help out. He’s putting a strain on my marriage. God, please give me the courage to ask him to leave.

Go again.

No one ever recognizes all the sacrifices that I make around here!

Go again.

It would be one thing if God asked Hosea to forgive his unfaithful wife or to be the bigger person in their broken marriage. Even that would be radical enough, right? But he doesn’t. He asks Hosea to pursue her. To leave himself vulnerable to humiliation and rejection. This type of love is the most selfless of all. God’s love. It gives nothing in return. There are no conditions or Plan Bs based on the initial response. There is just one plan, repeated over and over and over until God declares that it is finished: Go again.

And this is what made me uneasy as I listened to the sermon and understood God’s call. Hosea made me uneasy: his unflinching obedience, his humiliation, his devotion, his perfectly good name dragged into the gutter; his perfectly intact pride assaulted by man and by God. It made me so uneasy that I couldn’t forget it, and it stayed with me for the next few months. It was there when I walked into my school each morning: Go again. It was there when I wanted to yell at my children: Go again. And it was there when I was too scared to make myself vulnerable and offer a stranger some help: Go again.

At the end of last school year, in early June, it was there when my department chair asked the English teachers to write a letter to ourselves. The letter would be sealed and delivered to us at the end of the summer. The purpose, I suppose, was to remind ourselves of something important that we might forget once removed from the refining furnace of public education. Most teachers wrote practical reminders about resources or planning techniques. Others wrote something like a pep talk.

A few weeks ago I found the letter on my desk in room 1511 as I was setting up for the new school year. It was still in the envelope as promised, placed there by the department chair. I didn’t need to read it. I already knew what it said, so I picked it up, threw it in the trash, and began arranging desks, anticipating the new groups of students that would be coming any day.

“Go again.”