“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: Make use of suffering.”

-Henri-Frédéric Amiel

I slowed the van as soon as I noticed him. He was round-shouldered and heavyset, but built more like a prizefighter than like your normal beer-can-tossing redneck from Augusta County. He was walking the wrong way on the 4-lane highway and as I pulled up I barely noticed his thumb stuck out for a lift. I rolled down the window. “Offer you a ride?” I asked. He nodded and thanked me quietly.

He was pretty well tatted up and I could see a sizable scar on his cheek; obviously a guy who had been around the barn a time or two. I rarely take on hitchhikers and never when my family is along, but I had just dropped my son off for work and was on my way home. Something (Someone?) told me this guy could use a ride today. As he got in the car I did surreptitiously move my iPhone 7 from the right side of the seat over to the left side, as if that $600 wedge of silicon and glass would be the greatest loss I might incur from the transaction.

Ever the extrovert, I began with, “So how is the world treating you? My name’s Jeremy” and stuck out my hand. He shook it firmly and said, “Good to meet you Jeremy. I’m Joe, and to answer your question, I just got out of jail.”

In the brief, stunned hesitation always enacted by polite society after such a statement, he asked, “Will you take a couple of bucks for your gas? I’m headed to the other side of Staunton.”

I was so sure after the first few words came out of his mouth that he was asking me for money, that I already started to say “Ummm, OK…” when I realized he was actually offering me money. Catching myself in mid-sentence, I thanked him and told him it was my pleasure.

For ten minutes we talked about old memories and new beginnings, of the masonry job he had just been offered and the fact that it actually had a good hourly wage and benefits, of when he first moved down to Virginia with nothing but a motorcycle and a backpack and his bricklaying tools, of his need to find a church home, of the prayer group he’d joined in prison and how it had changed his life. When we pulled up to the service station where he was supposed to meet his friend, he offered again to buy me a soda or something. I thanked him and told him he had already blessed me, and with encouraging words both ways, we parted.

Driving away, I could feel nothing but astonishment and admiration. It takes a real man to be as honest as Joe was, to respond to a stranger’s question with the naked truth of “I just got out of jail” and not offer any explanation or deflection, or feel the need to justify himself to me. He shared with me without hesitation his excitement about his freedom and the new job he would soon be starting, accepted my judgmental postures about him without responding to me in kind, and offered to bless me with his scant resources.

And the more I thought about it, the more a gnawing doubt began to fill my mind: What if Joe were no ordinary human being? Are we not told by the apostle to show hospitality to strangers with the hope that we might someday be visited by someone not born of flesh and blood? And does he not in the very next breath, as though anticipating my very predictable response, go on to exhort us to remember those in prison as though we were in prison with them?

Whether Joe was a supernatural being or not (a possibility I cannot by any means rule out), I know God had our paths cross for a reason. It was not by accident that he and I met this week, when so much of my thought is given to what it means to fall.

There is no real category for it in our culture – even in our Christian culture. We know how to guard against personal failure, how to put good boundaries in place, how to repent when we make mistakes; we even know how to come alongside others when they do wrong. But there is nowhere in our collective consciousness a path of discipleship designed for that moment when we realize that we have not merely miscalculated our altitude or airspeed, but that we have fallen completely out of the airplane, and that we have about 30 seconds until the final impact to mull it all over. It is new territory, and I suspect that it is common to everyone who goes through it.

The pain associated with such a realization is impossible to overstate. The series of events that led up to the wrongdoing, the pride that refused to acknowledge them, the secret enjoyment of the taste of the forbidden fruit, the “sea of lies” (as Baggett said in his sermon today) that buoyed up the self-delusion: all rise up with a cacophony of voices that condemn and banish, with no hope of return. One begins to appreciate Paul’s warning in 2Cor to reaffirm the Church’s love for the wayward, lest they be overcome with excessive sorrow.

For sorrow does not make up for sin. Insofar as it is godly sorrow, it can help communicate repentance and it can show sincerity, but it can never atone. My suffering can only ever draw back the veil and tell the truth about grief, and that only if I am perfectly truthful and transparent in it. It does no lasting good to anyone to say “I am sad that I am falling through the sky right now, and that in doing so I have done great hurt to many people I loved.”

There is, then, a need for a Rescuer. There is a need for One who can arrest my fall and take me in His hands – those precious, scarred hands – and who can bring me to a safe place, much as I deserve otherwise. There is a need for a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, who took on Himself the eternal penalty for sin and who yet rose again, whose suffering can alone be made use of in the eternal art of living. And when we find ourselves taken up in His love, we will respond as I saw Joe do, in a quiet confidence that speaks the truth about who we are in Christ Jesus, and that moves into a world no more or less broken than we are with a message of hope. For in that moment we will recall the words of Jesus to those of us who have abandoned our first love:

Remember the height from which you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.

JV

Photo credit: The Fox and the Raven

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV