Oh the Humanity

What I’m writing today are some devotionals for Words of Hope. I have some devotionals currently running in Words of Hope (as of March 16), which you can access at:www.woh.org/word/devotionals. You can read stunning and lyrical devotionals by me at that spot for the rest of the month. (Except they can only be 250 words long, and it is a challenge to be stunning and lyrical in 250 words – but I do my best.)

Today I’m writing a new set of devotionals for them that hopefully will run in 2012 on the topic of trust and I was just writing about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying for “the cup to pass from him.” He understood the torture coming his way and didn’t welcome it. Who would? I wrote “He was as human as any of us.”

Of course Christians believe more than that about Jesus, but I want to stop at “as human as any of us” for a moment and tie that line back to what I wrote this weekend about Gandhi and the nature of truth. I understand my Gandhi post is too long, too detailed, and too esoteric for a lot of interactive comments. (Not to mention being about a guy who’s been dead for 60+ years and a 28-year-old movie – I “get” that that topic’s nowhere near as cool as Nick Hornby.) My daughter Amanda wrote a long comment, and I wanted to take this opportunity to respond by publicly saying I will mark March, 2011 in my calendar as the month I surrendered to the fact that my daughter is smarter than me. (My son Jesse is smarter than me, too, which he demonstrates by not following my blog. Don’t tell him I wrote this and we’ll see if he ever says anything to me about it.)

Anyway, enough about our twisted familial relationships. Here’s what I’m trying to say: in addition to her posted comment, Amanda also sent me an email with this line in it: “Your Blog entry hopefully will get some readers to think about Gandhi in a way more reflective of humanity and less of perfection.”

We worship perfection (hence my feeling the need to remind people that Jesus was human) and are sorely disappointed in our heroes when they insist on being human. For exhibit A I will present Tiger Woods.

Wouldn’t it be better for us if it were the other way around, if we understood our heroes were human and not perfect? I am reminded of an assignment I gave in my past life when I was involved in training a group of new Young Life staff and we were reading a book full of stories about the founder of the organization. One day I asked our training group what part of the book resonated deepest with them. (To be honest, the book was heavy on the side of presenting perfection more than humanity. There were plenty of heroic stories in the book about all-night prayer meetings, powerful public speaking, and stuff like that.) In response to my question one of the people in the training group said, “The thing that struck me the most in the book was the story about the day he went to a house where a club meeting was supposed to take place and there weren’t any cars out in front and he told the guy driving the car to keep going – he didn’t feel like going in if there weren’t going to be very many kids there. I feel like that, too.” We were required to use that book every year, and without fail, every year someone in the training group would make the same comment. They identified much more with humanity than perfection.

Of course now that I think about Tiger Woods (and I really don’t think about Tiger Woods very much), might we say his problem is that he rarely lets us see he’s human and so, when he fell so ignobly a lot of people enjoyed it? What if instead of sticking to corporate image management when his life blew up he would have said a few authentic, genuine comments about his behavior … something like, “Yeah, I really like sex.” I’m writing off the top of my head here, without any reflection, and I’m following my train of thought about being transparent about your shortcomings and now find I’m contemplating Charlie Sheen. Okay, I guess we don’t really want to know everything about someone’s full humanity, do we?

There, I’ve done it. I’ve put Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen into the same blog post. Let’s see you write something clever about that, Amanda!

My open invitation for the rest of you is to write any comment you want about Jesus, Gandhi, Tiger or Sheen. I look forward to it.