The Elevator

Or: Why I Like To Have An Enemy

Tuesday morning I hit snooze a couple times, then got my daughters up (not an easy task with teens and tweens in the Summer) before driving to hang out with my wife in the hospital. She’d been there about two weeks, getting a stem cell transplant to fight her Multiple Myeloma, a nasty beast of a blood cancer.

Thankfully, she was able to come home the next day, and is continuing her recovery more comfortably at home. While she was there, though, I was having to balance being with her while still working and parenting our kids back at home. It was, and is, a stressful, foggy place.

This particular morning I had to leave after an hour or so to go tour an old recording studio with some folks for a project we’ll be working on later this year. After the tour we went to a coffeeshop down the road to discuss what we’d seen, then walked back to our cars, before I headed back to the hospital.

As I stepped into the elevator for the third floor where she was staying, I snapped this picture:

We’d just gotten the word that she would be heading home soon and I realized I hadn’t really documented this intense, weird, scary, boring and profound time in our lives with any cell phone pics. I mean, did it even happen without the photos to prove it?

While I squared up the angles to try and get a perpendicular line between the door and the wall, I realized for the first time how strange this day was. What an abnormal life we had gotten accustomed to...

I am fairly certain no one else at my meeting would be passing a door like this one that day:

An hour or so later I was sitting there in her room and I opened the news on my phone. In case you missed it, there’s been some wild activity going on recently and my news feed was overwhelmed with people vilifying one another in the worst of terms.

Abhorrent behavior that, like life in a hospital, we somehow have just become immune to.

For some reason it hit me that, if the people I sat with in the coffee shop didn’t know what was going on in my life and how that might affect me, I surely didn’t know what was going on in the lives of the people I was reading about.

I instantly thought of the old saying “Be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”.

The truth is, everybody on every side of those conversations has had days like I was having. They might be having them right now. Who knows the loved ones in the hospital, the grief of those who have passed, the fear of overwhelming debt, the worry over a wayward kid? We’re all carrying so much, aren’t we?

It’s so EASY to vilify, though! Especially when I’m in pain, I find that I often want someone to blame. 

I have learned about myself, as well, that when life is hard and full of grey, as life so often is, part of my urge to open up the news is to look for an enemy. 

It’s a human response. It’s why we like watching Star Wars or reality shows or sports - there are good guys (us) and bad guys (them). 

We don’t have to do the hard work of caring about what they might be going through, or keeping a rein on how we think about them or how we treat them. 

Why should we? They’re the bad guys! Our worst behavior is justified because they are the opposing evil.

It’s nice to feel superior. It’s nice to feel right. It’s nice to have some sort of clarity at the end of a hard day.

But this is not the way of Christ. 

“Love your enemies,” Jesus said. “Pray for those who persecute you.” “If someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.” (Matthew 5)

While there might be a loophole there, since most of us are never going to be sued over a tunic, I think the spirit of the message is clear.

To lean on another phrase, it’s not enough just to walk a mile in your enemy’s shoes, Jesus tells us in his Sermon on the Mount that we should walk with them, longer than we even have to!

My first instinct is never to do this. It’s to tear them down and the institutions that enable them.

So often this is my response when I read the news: I feel better about myself by thinking the worst of them. 

This Tuesday morning, though, I was given a little grace to see things more clearly. That’s because my friend Steve, who was at that meeting with me, knew what was going on with us and asked, on our way back to our cars, about my wife and my day and how I was doing.

It was a short conversation. A small, kind gesture from a kind man. (These days, I should add, have been flooded with kind friends.) But it meant that as I stepped on that elevator a few minutes later, though I might have been the only person in our meeting having this particular type of hard day, I knew that somebody cared about me and understood where I was.

When I opened the news then, I wasn’t looking for a fight or an ego boost. I was able to wonder about the day those politicians, lawyers, judges and journalists might have been having, and say a quick prayer for them rather than a curse. My blood pressure probably went down! Not my normal reaction to seeing such nasty headlines.

I was thankful. In the midst of a “hard battle”, I’d been shown kindness, and the day’s burdens were ever so slightly lifted.

Or to put it more simply:

I guess sometimes I think I want an enemy, but what I really need is a friend.