“You Understand.” Well…not really.

As a pastor you get to see things and experience things that leave you scratching your head. Some are amusing, some are hurtful, others leave you wishing you could delete the moment from your memory. This is hardly unique to pastors. If anything we get off easy.

I can’t imagine (nor do I really want to) the carnage and heartbreak first responders not only witness but experience. Events we experience become part of our stories. Each car accident an ambulance crew is called to, the firemen who extricates broken bodies with the jaw of life, the police who not only investigate are often the ones who have to deliver crushing news to loved ones, each event they experience becomes part of their story, their memory. The same is true for the doctors, nurses and medical techs working in hospitals. The same is true for the specialist who delivers news that no one wants to hear. I sometimes wonder about counsellors too, what stories they have heard that keep them awake at night. I’ve heard some things I would rather forget. I can’t imagine the images forever burned into their minds.

I can’t with any authority or worthy credibility speak for the folks I just mentioned other than having watched EMTs, nurses and doctors fight back the tears. Bravado and coarseness is often an outlet, but it is not a delete button. I once worked as a civilian contractor in the law enforcement arena. The dark humour I heard was not from a darkness of soul, it was a way of coping with the even darker realities they faced. Certainly those who serve in the military must be counted among them. It is easy to become hardened and jaded in such places. I have not walked in their shoes, but I have for the briefest of moments walked beside them.

On that feeble authority I plead with you, never say to them, “you understand, you’re a ________ (fill in the blank).” Saying “I understand” is bad enough when there is no way that you have a clue, but at least it is – or hopefully is – a valiant though vain attempt to offer comfort.

I know I have had people say to me, “you’re a pastor, you understand.” Well, no, not really. Or at least what I understand has nothing to do with what you think I understand. What I do understand is that the very presumption that I should understand is fraught with assumptions and even coldness. How much greater for those who deal daily with tragedy and suffering. I can’t imagine saying to an EMT who was hit by a drunk driver, “oh, you’re an EMT, you understand, we need to cut off your leg.”

Let me say this as clearly as possible. Having a title or position does not give you some sort of immunity to emotional or physical pain. All the title means is, “I’ll be there for you in your pain. I’ll cry later.” I have never forgotten the essence of the words of a first aid instructor when I was in grade eight. “Stop the bleeding, puke later.” That’s what those who help you in your crisis have to do daily.

Take my word for it, if you haven’t walked in someone else’s shoes, don’t presume to know what they understand. The only thing we come close to understanding is our own pain, and even that…often we can’t even come to grips with what we are going through. We all hurt. We all have pain. Titles don’t eliminate that. So forget the dismissive prattle. Tell them your sorry as a sign of entering in to their grief, even if it is only scratching the surface. Tell them your grateful for them. Buy them a coffee. Be a friend. Walk the road with them to the extent you can. Remember, we are all human.

Intro to “The Warped Mirror”

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Two things drive me nuts. Okay, there are a lot more than two, however these two are high on my list. The first is assuming certainty and the second is false piety.

The first is assuming that we can be more certain of things than we ought to be. Not that a sense of certainty is bad. For instance, I am certain that if I hold my laptop in the air and let go of it, that it will fall. I am also fairly certain that it wouldn’t work right afterwards, but who knows, maybe it will. I am less certain of the wisdom of trying that. If I was demonstrating a new ultra rugged laptop as part of a sales presentation, dropping the laptop might be precisely what I need to do. On the other hand, if I were freaking out over a spider running across my foot…hang on to the laptop. Better yet, leave it on the table. Ironically, even my certainty that letting go of the laptop would result in it accelerating rapidly towards the floor is it in itself, contextual. If by some weird chance I were spending the afternoon on the International Space Station, my laptop would merely float around the room…at least I think I am certain about that.

The second is the phony mask of super human perfection. It is another one of those “are you kidding me” character traits that entangles my feet like roots and vines in the rain forest, presenting me with plenty of opportunity to test the certainty of gravity.

One of my favourite verses in the bible says something like, “whoever says they don’t sin is a liar.” Friends (and those who are questioning whether or not they want to be my friend) we are human. Yes, we are fallible, messed up, confused, perplexed, perfrumped humans. True, I sort of made up the word perfrumped but I am almost certain that Mel Brooks used it once in a movie script. The sooner we realize how messed up we are, the sooner we can get on with life and maybe — I am sort of certain — we can offer each other the grace and mercy we all need. It seems to me that you can’t truly love someone for who they are if you are in denial of who you really are.

The problem as I see it, is that when we look in the mirror we want to see a Photoshopped image of ourselves. We are quite capable of doing just that, gullible people we are. For that matter there is a lot of self-help gurus who tell us to imagine the perfect us, the intergalactic hero out to save the universe from mediocrity. O what an awesome me that only I see!

I have a better idea, take a look at yourself in a warped mirror. You know, one of those ones that make you look fifty pounds overweight with a nose your friends can use as an umbrella. There are two wonderful benefits of seeing yourself that way. The first is that you will be pleasantly relieved to find out you aren’t all that bad and two, it will shatter that super hero image you have of yourself thereby allowing you realize that you aren’t half as good as the image you try to project. It’s called getting real.

For what it’s worth, I have a warped mirror in my art studio. I use it help see imperfections in my paintings. That might seem counter intuitive because surely it doesn’t reflect what is really there. Believe it or not, that is exactly why I like it. It shocks the system so that I look at the painting differently, so that what I see is what is, not what I think it is. We need to do the same thing for ourselves once in a while. We need to take a long hard look in a warped mirror to shock us into seeing who we really are in all our internal messiness, to see our own uncertainty and questions. Then and only then, can we truly confess our wayward ways and move toward being who we want to be.

Welcome to The Warped Mirror.