To Him which is Yes

As the bell rang, I shut the classroom door and sighed deeply.

“Your assignment is on the board,” I said loudly, trying to rise above the din of junior-high horseplay.

The assignment was to write a “credo,” a personal statement of belief, like Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  I thought it was a good assignment because it would keep the class – especially Trevor – reasonably quiet for forty-five minutes.

I propped my elbows on my desk and massaged my temples.  What a fraud you are, I thought, giving them an assignment you wouldn’t dare attempt yourself.

How had I gotten from there to here?  “There” was success: the awards; the scholarship; the acceptance letter from Teach For America; the diamond ring; the girlfriend who became a fiancée on that February night, on the front porch of her grandparents’ old house in our hometown.

“Here” was failure: the phone call; the sleepless night; the diamond ring again; the sobbing, the mourning its death, the pushing all of that down, down, deep inside, to be dealt with at another time, another place, because I had “a very important job to do.”

So I had showed up that first day in my coat and tie, ready to pour everything into the task at hand, to lead these poor kids to literary enlightenment.  Now, five months later, that dream, too, had been shattered by reality.  On one wall was “Billy Grammar,” that cartoon missionary I had invented “to spread the gospel of good grammar to 7^th graders around the world” – he was now missing an arm, an ear, and half a leg.  At the front of the room was the bulletin board that had once displayed our “class mantra,” a creed that in the beginning we recited every day.  It was a quote from Paul “Bear” Bryant: If you believe in yourself and have dedication and pride – and never quit – you will be a winner.  The price of victory is high, but so are the rewards. Now, graffiti obscured most of the words and the red background was ripped in several places.  We rarely recited the mantra now – several days would pass before a student would mention it.

I looked up to check on the class.  Everyone looked busy – except Trevor.  He sat upright in his desk, looking straight ahead, rarely blinking.  He had not so much as taken out a piece of paper.  I strode to Trevor’s desk and hovered over him.

“You can either begin your essay right now or you can leave my class,” I whispered, a little more hotly than I had intended.  Trevor’s eyes met mine, and I saw… pain?  Without looking down, he deliberately took out his notebook and gripped his pencil.  I strutted back to my desk, surprised by how effective I had been-but a little shaken by what I saw in Trevor’s eyes.  It seemed so familiar.

As I pretended to grade yesterday’s pop quizzes, my mind wandered to the book I had been reading: The Brothers Karamazov.  I had picked it up because I am one of four brothers, just like the Karamazovs.  The hero of the novel is the youngest brother, Alyosha, a seminarian with a sincere, but untested, belief in the goodness of God and the possibilities of redemption.

But I was the second-eldest, like Ivan Karamazov: the coldly analytical atheist who cannot reconcile the concept of a loving God with the intractable suffering in the world.  Ivan challenges Alyosha’s faith by telling the story of the five year-old girl whose parents delight in berating her, beating her, even filling her mouth with excrement — and then sleep peacefully as the little girl wails in her room down the hall.  What kind of God, Ivan asks, could think that “free will” is worth the cost?  “Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil,” says Ivan. “Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to ‘dear, kind God!’”

Alyosha has no riposte, and neither did I.  In the thick fog of my own depression, where was God?  And if I found him or he found me, why would I want to have anything to do with him after what he had let happen to me?  So much for the “gift of life” – life isn’t a gift when it is nothing but pain.  The only gift, I thought, would be relief from having to face life every day.

I looked up to check on Trevor.  To my surprise, he was writing feverishly, as if his pencil could not keep up with his mind.  Suddenly, he threw down his pencil and walked directly to my desk.  Without saying a word, he placed his essay in front of me, walked away, put his head down on his desk, and sobbed quietly.

Trevor’s credo was entitled, “WHAT?!”, and this is how it read:

“What is the basic [sic] for all life?  Life is like a pig and a farmer.  The farmer and his family love the pig, but as soon as they get a little hungry, it’s off with its head.”

Then I remembered that Trevor’s girlfriend, Lakeisha, had broken up with him earlier that week.  She sat just a few seats away from him in my class.  That was the pain I had seen in his eyes, and here it was on his paper.

“At any given moment you what?  You worry about the trials and tribulations in life and it makes you want to commit suicide.  You can’t prevent the inebitable [sic].  You die and that’s it … If life is so precious, why do I waste it?  If you have free will, why force yourself to do wrong?  It should be so evident what the right way is, but it isn’t.”

The despair in Trevor’s words troubled me.  He sounded like me.  He sound like Ivan Karamazov.

I flipped the page.

“But the Lord is my Shepard [sic].  And I will not be in want.

“If all you do in life is live day by day never accomplishing anything, you my brother should not worry about next day or this battle but it’s the Big Picture or the War you should stay focused on.  His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me.  He watches me.  He cares about me. He loves me.  He keeps me in perfect peace.  Halelujah [sic] to God Almighty, to Jehova Jira [sic], to the Awesome Ruler.  To Him which is Yes.”

“To Him which is Yes”: the allusion to the e.e. cummings poem i thank You God for most this amazing day – which we had read in class — stunned me.

Trevor concluded:

“So, what.  What does this all mean.  Well, it means this.

Why

He

Always cares about

Trevor.”

And in a page and a half of wide-ruled notebook paper, a twelve year-old explained the meaning of life with the most profound exposition of free will, sin, redemption, and grace I have ever read or heard.  It took Dostoevsky 900 pages.

I wish I could say that everything changed for me that day.  Make no mistake: Trevor’s credo moved me – I knew, in that moment, that God had used Trevor to speak to me, and I listened.  But even as we lay our burdens, our sins, all of our miserable shortcomings, at the foot of the cross, it still takes time for life’s deepest wounds to heal.  Nor does grace immunize us from life’s future hurts.  As amazing as grace is, we have to re-discover it from time to time as we suffer new scars in places we never dreamed were vulnerable to attack.

The apostle Paul assures us that “no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ.”  (2 Corinthians 1:20).  Grace is not a one-time transaction, but a constant process of redemption and renewal, as Christ takes on our hurts as they happen.  It has been almost seven years since Trevor taught me this lesson, and in that time, God has been faithful.  Those wounds that were so fresh and messy have healed completely; what is more, I am now married to my best friend, and God has blessed us with a little girl, who is expected to enter this world officially in April.  Alas, new “trials and tribulations” lurk around the corner – a financial crisis threatens our family’s security, the pressure of my profession (I’m now a lawyer) is an ever-present source of anxiety, and uncertainty seems like the only certainty ahead.  But because of grace, I can face those uncertainties with the confidence that God “watches me … cares about me … loves me … [and] keeps me in perfect peace” through it all.

To Him which is Yes, indeed.

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