The Visible Kingdom |
| Posted by Mark (mark) on Sep 17 2008 |
There was a dejected air to her stride; her plain features—unremarkable eyes, curved bulbous nose, large cheeks, thin lips, unkempt eyebrows—hung under the weight of it. Wandering the streets she ruminated to herself, barely audible, as though she were unaware her inner monologue was gently spilling into the ocean of people around her. Rounding a corner she arrived at the bus stop and set herself heavily down upon the bench. The man next to her fidgeted at the sound of soft mumbles breaking the air, and turned toward her. Acutely aware of his stare, she turned away and went silent; but even then she could feel his curiosity probing her.
Finally turning back, a despondency still tainting her eyes, she looked at him. He was more unremarkable than her. No feature drew attention for its beauty or ghastliness; they just were. And together, they formed a monotony of bland commonality. He was altogether forgettable. Satisfied she would find no answers there, she turned away once more. He continued to stare ruthlessly, unswayed by the vast weight of common cultural politeness. Silence. More silence. It got thicker and thicker, the tension mounting until she could take no more.
“Well?” she bellowed with more than a hint of ire, and turned toward the man letting the full flavor of her despondency wash over him.
“I don’t mean to be rude ma'am,”
“You’re failing at that,” she volleyed into the middle of his sentence.
“I was just wondering why such a beautiful woman carried such a heavy heart.”
Taken aback she probed the statement. “Is he insulting me?” she wondered. “I’m not beautiful. But then look how ugly he is. In context, maybe I am.”
“No, I’m not terribly handsome am I?”
“What?” she started with fearsome surprise. She’d forgotten her inner monologue had been escaping all morning. Mortally embarrassed she quickly switched the subject and gave all her attention to the conversation now. “What is it you want sir?”
“Like I said, just wonderin’ why you’re so down, ma'am,” he tipped his hat upon striking the word ma'am.
Whether it was the dejection overwhelming her instinctive privacy, or the embarrassment she still strongly felt, or a little of both, she didn’t know; but she responded honestly without thinking, which only piqued her embarrassment, as she felt completely incapable of hiding anything today. She might as well have forgotten to wear clothes, for the way she felt. “End of a search I guess. A very important search.” It was a minor admission, but she knew in her depths it was the gateway to full disclosure, if this nosy man pressed the point. And so mortification wrapped about her head as a vice of self-consciousness.
“By the look of ya, one might think it was a life and death matter.” he responded with his ignorant lips.
“It was.” she returned coldly, now fully aware of the flood of information longing to be confessed within her.
“Really?” A simple answer, from a simple face. But hung upon it, whether by his impetus or more likely her internal struggle, was enough weight to bring her confession crashing down.
She unloaded. “If you must know sir,” flipping her nose at him now, “I’ve been searching for the kingdom of God.” Waving her hand in a dismissive motion, she continued, “Yes I know, it sounds crazy. I guess it was.” her head hanging low now. Patiently he waited without interjecting. “I got tired of all the platitudes, you see. I got tired of all the holier-than-thou-two-faced serpents, myself included.” A wave of anger flushed her cheeks to the tip of her nose, and he could tell faces and names were running through her mind. “I just needed something real. So I decided to stop going thru the motions. I decided that if God were real, I’d be able to find Him; I’d be able to see Him at work in the world.” The anger was gone now, as her countenance reset back to her default dejection. “I’ve looked in the grandest cathedrals. I’ve hunted down the living heroes of the faith, only to find them wanting. I’ve researched church history and the lives of dead saints, as the saying goes— ‘never have a living hero’—but I tell you the dead ones are just as bad. I’ve travelled the world to revivals and tent meetings, where I heard God was meeting people. But I can’t see Him. I see the stories, I hear other people talk of Him at work; but my own experience tells me differently.”
“I remember the first day I saw the kingdom of God,” said the man softly, his eyes wistfully looking into the distance now, piercing the past.
“You’ve seen the kingdom of God?” She said with an accusatory and incredulous tone.
“Yes, I’m sure you have too. I guess what I should have said, was I remember the day I first recognized the kingdom of God.”
“Really?” A simple word from a simple face. But it was infused with such biting sarcasm, one could have easily mistaken her blunted tone for a shout.
The man turned toward her once more and smiled softly. “I was a monster once.”
“Pardon?”
“A monster. You see, years ago, when I was a young adolescent there was this kid Billy. I was a monster to him.” Tears accompanied the recollection. But they didn’t appear as tears of regret with rotund, heavy proportions and long snaking vines. They seemed more as tears of gratefulness, light with broken and incomplete vines. This confused her.
“What do you mean?” she asked with sudden earnestness.
“I was always the smallest kid in class. Weaker and slower and the outsider. I got beat up and bullied as you can imagine. I suppose I was good for one thing: making the other kids feel better about themselves. And this is how I understood life to be, though I knew I shouldn’t allow that to shape my decisions, even at that tender age. When Billy moved in one summer, everything changed. He was noticeably smaller than I was. He was kind of dumb too, or so I thought.” The man paused with a wince.
“What happened?” She said, tenderness beginning to sneak into her voice.
“I let insecurity shape me into something I knew I would hate later. You see, in front of all the guys, I beat Billy mercilessly. Suddenly I was an insider. I wasn’t the weakest anymore.”
She recoiled and contorted her face, half in disgust and half in compassion. “How did you deal with what you’d done?”
“I perpetuated it. I couldn’t befriend him, or apologize without losing my new position on the inside. So I beat him—” a painful pause of recollection, “mercilessly—couple times a week I think, for several years.”
“How could you do that?” she gasped in horror.
“I told you I was a monster. Billy never would tell his folks who was doing it. And I couldn’t understand why. Not sure I still do. But it helped me get away with it. Some of the guys said he was too stupid, that’s why he didn’t tell. They called him—” he paused, as if catching himself, “I called him retard.”
“What does this have to do with recognizing the kingdom?” she said, trying to help steer him from such ugly memories.
“Well, a fews years into this cycle, I was still getting picked on whenever Billy wasn’t around to be my punching bag. One day I got cornered by seven or eight guys. They knocked me down, and as I lay there getting kicked, I could see Billy across the street. They were so busy with me, none of them noticed him. I had the wind knocked out of me and couldn’t speak. Billy could’ve slipped away unnoticed. But when he saw what was happening—and he knew it was me, because we made eye contact, me looking out through the forrest of violent legs, and him across the street—he ran straight for us.” She gasped in fear, breathlessly waiting the conclusion. “He pushed into the crowd and begged them to stop beating me. Of course, they immediately turned on him and left me alone. They beat him bad.”
Tears were wetting her face now. “Was he okay?”
“Eventually. But you see, I knew that I should get up and join in the attack if I wanted to avoid being picked on for the next few weeks. I would’ve been one of the gang who beat him up, part of the clique, for awhile anyway. I had all the same motivations to beat him up as I had had many times before. But I couldn’t do it. Something had broken in my heart. I wasn’t a monster anymore. It was like awaking from a horrible slumber.
“When they all left I went over to Billy, and knelt beside his broken and bleeding body. I asked him, ‘Why did you do it?’ and he said in his own sort of slow way, ‘because I know what it’s like to be beaten, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’ I crumbled into more tears, but not the shallow kind from physical pain. No, I was broken by his mercy, because I knew that I was exactly that: his worst enemy. And that is when I recognized the kingdom. The kingdom wakes people from their horrible slumber. And often it comes disguised in the foolish and weak, not the strong and valiant. That’s the kingdom. Not rituals, not some icon or historical hero, but Billy’s act of mercy and sacrifice. You want to know God? Want to know what He looks like? I just think of Billy whenever I forget. And then I start to see Him at work in people all around me. Sometimes, in spite of my insecurities, I even recognize His fingerprint in my own heart. So you see ma’am, maybe you’ve just been looking in the wrong places.” he finished his story with a warm smile that creased his face and made it look leathery.
She just stared at him silently. No more thoughts of his ugliness. Not even the dejection she’d carried so wearisomely that morning. Something stirred inside her that had been dormant for a long while. Maybe she was now awaking from her horrible slumber. Later that evening as she pondered the encounter, she was struck by the fact that a nameless, faceless man had revealed the kingdom to her. He was the opposite of all the charismatic men and women she’d sought; all the grandiose locales and majestic heroes of the faith she’d pursued on her journey. Maybe he was right, maybe she had been looking in all the wrong places.
Last changed: Oct 14 2008 at 4:40 PM
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