Don’t Ride the Rumble Strip
At the top of my list of people who have inspired me are two Jews, a preacher I never met, and a murderer.
Jesus was, of course, Jewish. Late in my teen years, when reading a book called Power for Living, I closed my eyes and asked Jesus to be my Lord and savior, and it changed my life journey forever.
The preacher I never met? I am speaking of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated when I was three, but whose actions and words have been for me a constant source of inspiration.
The murderer? Well, even if he didn’t actually participate in the stoning death of Stephen, the Apostle Paul (known then as Saul) was there condoning it. Paul’s prolific writings are as familiar to me as a mother’s voice is to her baby.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, the second Jew high on my list, is best known as author of the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. But I love an equally brilliant but less known work of his – How Good Do We Have to Be?
In that book, Kushner rightly notes that most people seem to live life as though it were a spelling bee … One mistake and you’re out. People who choose to live by this rigid standard often wallow in the guilt of bad choices.
Kushner urges his readers to look at life more like a baseball season, where even the best teams lose a third of their games and even the worst teams have their moments of brilliance. God doesn’t expect a perfect life, Kushner writes, but rather an honest attempt at a good one.
“We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough,” Kushner says.
During a 1965 commencement address at Oberlin College King said: “The time is always right to do what is right.”
But, like those baseball teams, we don’t always get things right, do we? We make errors. We strike out.
Sadly, some people believe God keeps track of our mistakes and punishes us somewhere down the line for them. It’s as if they’ve never heard the story of the prodigal son returning home to the loving arms of his father. Or, more likely perhaps, they know the story and simply don’t believe it applies to them.
“Religion properly understood is the cure for feelings of guilt and shame, not their cause,” Kushner says.
In his most familiar work, the Apostle Paul reminds us that love “keeps no record of wrongs.” (I Corinthians 13:5).
We are in the midst of the season of Lent, moving toward Good Friday, the day when reflect upon Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice to save us from our sin.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus,” Paul wrote (Romans 3:23).
Perhaps in this season we will let go of long-held guilt and trust that God not only forgave us when we asked, but forgot about our transgression when we wouldn’t.
Author Doug Fields compares our conscience to rumble strips on the side of the highway. They’re there to correct us, to get us back between the lines, to protect us from drifting into greater harm. They’re not there to travel upon mile after mile after mile.
During Lent and always, may we never forget about God’s grace freely given, as Paul said, through the redemption that came to us in Jesus.
And may we finally let go of whatever may have haunted us and fall into the loving, outstretched arms of God. ~ Forrest
Forrest White
Director of Mission Ministries
First United Methodist Church
72 Lake Morton Drive
Lakeland, FL 33801
863-686-3163
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."
~Jesus Christ, Matthew 22:37-39
