Treasures of Darkness

As I write this, I am in a café, sitting in the corner, trying hard not to make a scene. I am weeping, suppressing groans and cries and wails so that I won’t be asked to leave. I came to read and study for a class I have in a few hours. Instead, I am humbled and awed and stunned into… into weeping.

You will understand a bit better after I explain in brief what happened this weekend. I have a friend, a friend I have known all of my life (who I speak of here), who has lived a crushingly destructive life. The choices he makes consistently wounds those around him, and the closer they are, the more he is meant to love them, the more he cuts and tears at them. His wife and children come to mind.

A couple of weeks ago I came to the end of my patience with his actions and choices. I love him too much to be passive and watch as he destroys himself. I wanted to call the true man into the ring. I set up a time to meet with him. There were two things I needed to get across at this meeting. One was that I wanted him to begin seeing the damage he has caused, the hurt and destruction his life has left in its wake. I wanted him to take a serious, unflinching glare into it. And second, I needed to let him know that I would no longer relate to him on any level except the most authentic: his damaging lifestyle. I would speak to him on no other plane except to bring him to reality and then, to help him to change only if he so chose. But that would come later. First, I wanted him broken and humbled and contrite at what he has done to himself and others.

Not an easy task. I felt going into the meeting a bit like Jeremiah, the prophet of hard sayings, the weeping prophet whose message from the Lord to Israel was brutal and harsh, since she had turned from her Lover-Lord to pursue other bedfellows. Someone had to bring her back to her senses. I knew that chances of success were higher if he were to come to an autonomous decision and understanding of his predicament through exploration and insight into his life, rather than having someone thrust upon him in impotent explanation what he is doing. He needed to see for himself, from his heart, the effects of his choices.

I realized this was my desire for this man.

What happened the day the meeting came is hard to explain. I almost want to fall back on the mythic tone of Scripture to describe the nature of the events, the way that I participated in something already going on, that I had a front-row seat to some deep and mysterious and even mystical change in the core recesses of this man’s very soul. And I use the word “soul” in the most literal sense, as that aspect of the whole being “that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self,” as Dallas Willard defines it. The “life-center” of the human being. My wrenching and mourning heart calling his to the same.

But he was already there. It was breakfast. We sat down to eggs and bacon and coffee, this man and me. I was prepared for what I’ve come to see as his typical defense against seeing the truth of his life: manipulation, control, threats, escape. I imagined him decking me or stabbing me with the yoke-soaked fork or just walking out, unable to hear what I was burdened to bring him.

Instead, he choked on the first words out of his mouth, words that I could barely understand but heard as “I am a bad father.”

I was stunned. I sat quietly while he tried to regain his composure. I came to speak honestly, man to man, and so I only said, “Yes, you are.”

The next four hours – four hours – we spoke about the decisions he has made in his life, of the way he cannot do what he has sincere intention to do (Romans 7), of the demons that have gained control over various aspects of his life, of what it means to be a father and a son and a brother and a friend of God, of repentance and forgiveness, of wounds and the messages about life interpreted from them, of his growing up and about his God.

Somehow, through it all, I came to see that I wasn’t doing anything but observing what was already going on in deep places in him. Before I arrived, I wondered how I would possibly be able to speak to the real man, to the deep and true person underneath the defenses and walls erected throughout his life to protect himself from abandonment and rejection. But I never had to. His heart was already ripe for the harvest, so to speak.

Understand, I love this man deeply. I want him to change for his own sake and the sake of his family. But I knew that in order to do so he had to recognize the way he lives first. The prodigal only began the trek back home when he looked around him and saw himself eating from pig troughs and remembered his father’s home. I came to meet this guy at feeding time and wanted to invite him to look around himself.

James tells us to “grieve, mourn and wail” and to “change our laughter to mourning and our joy to gloom.” And this is why. To look honestly at our situation and predicament often calls for that: mourning. This friend this day was mourning. God was “cutting the bars of iron” in the rescue of his soul (see Isaiah 45:2-3). And I got to witness it. I got to plunder the “treasures of darkness and hidden riches” of his soul and the vision of it redeemed. I got to participate so that I would know that “the Lord called me by name.”

I am barely able to write through the tears. This is what it means to praise the Living God, to be so grateful that you fall before Him speechless.

What I wrote a month back (in this post) about this friend and his situation was that “the love my wife and I have for [he and his family] is not enough to ransom them from this snare. They need the unyielding ministry of Christ in the deepest places.” And this is, it turns out, a great picture of what is happening for this man now: Jesus painfully and violently breaking him out of the illusions with an unyielding intention to bring him into truth and life. It is a severe mercy, this ransom of the treasure of his heart from darkness.