“…two demoniacs coming out of the tombs met him. They were so fierce that no one could pass that way” (Matthew 8:28)
A pastor-friend grew up with a stutter. Like most (if not all) children with a stutter, he was quieter because of it. He knew that o-o-o-one instance of this verbal t-t-t-t-tick could send all the children around him into fits of laughter. When this inevitably happened, he felt his cheeks burn with shame and his soul erupt in flames of sorrow.
A woman knows that every Friday – pay day – means her husband is going to come home with a celebratory 24-pack of beer. He’ll have the first two down before dinner is served and will finish off half his haul before the night is over. On the best weeks, he’ll just get lazy and drowsy, but on the worst ones he’ll become loud and belligerent. As the years pass, this woman gets good at making herself scarce after dinner most Fridays. Visits to her parents, tending to the kids, a project in the basement that really needs her attention – she finds the way to not be present when he’s drinking.
An old man sleeps in the guest room now. Some time, over the last 24 months since his wife of 53 years passed away, he has slowly migrated there. It began when he had a particular bad spell with his aching back and he moved to the guest bed because it was firmer and provided him more relief. Then, one day, after doing a load of laundry, he just stored that batch of clothes in the guest dresser and guest closet. Slowly the guest room became his room, full of the artifacts of his daily life – pocket change, that fancy alarm clock that’s supposed to charge his cell phone that his kids got him (that he doesn’t really know how to use), a laundry hamper, his medicines. As for his actual bedroom? It’s been three weeks (and counting) since he was even in that room. Its door is shut, the air inside it stale from lack of circulation.
We have a way of insulating ourselves from places of shame, fear, and sorrow. Psychologists would call these things defense mechanisms (and defense mechanisms are not inherently bad or sinful). But whether right or wrong, we can just cut off certain places or thoughts or people who present too much of a perceived threat to us.
Not so for our Savior.
In the Gadarenes, there were some tombs that were occupied by two demonic men. All previous attempts to still visit the dead – or even pass by this place – had resulted in beatings and bruises. So much so that, now, all the townspeople just knew to stay away. They had forged new paths to where they needed to go, they’d found the work around (like my pastor-friend with the stutter, who just avoided certain words that he knew always gave him trouble). They had, in short, adapted.
The problem with adapting, however, is that is concedes a certain part of what is God’s to someone or something other than God. It’s like singing “Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee,” but then listing this part and that part and this one additional part that God isn’t privy to. Adapting inherently denies God access, which is why Jesus has to walk through these tombs. He walks through the dead places of our lives in order to bring them back to life, in order to declare that – yes, even these places – they belong to God.
To be clear, this is the sort of work only meant for God. However, if you have a walled-off part of your own life, heart, or soul, know that our God is walking through there and that you can join Him for the stroll. And when we do, He doesn’t necessarily transform the bad places, but transforms us.
Somewhere along the way, my pastor-friend started trusting God to lead him through even these embarrassing places in his life. This following led him, first, to become a lawyer and then, later, to become a pastor – both professions that require A LOT of talking! But he didn’t have to fear any longer because God had transformed him, even though he still has a stutter. Amen.
