IV – When Randy Found Everything (and Some of it Made Him Cry)
A Story for Anxious Times
Chapter 4
What can change a scared or angry man isn’t at all what the world thinks. There is a segment of Americana that thinks gambling and porn make life worth living. There is an overlapping segment that look for joy in the plastic and metal goods we drool over almost as quickly as we grow bored with. But the only way to make a man brave and happy is to make him love the right things in the right order. And there is only One who can change what you love.
While Randy was getting his broken right hand treated at the hospital, his wife Margaret was talking to the sister Randy thought was crazy (in fairness to him, he was half right; Margaret’s sister was normal enough when sober, but she was usually four or five glasses of red wine deep by her semi-nightly phone call with Margaret) and deciding where to leave the divorce papers. He’d be most likely to see them on the island in their beautifully redone open kitchen (thanks to her sister’s tasteful, if drunken, advice), but putting them under the TV remote control was not much less conspicuous, and had a subtle bitter jab that made her feel good.
One of the kindest things God can do to a person is show him the ugliness of his own heart. But it takes that divine kindness because of our stubbornly blind self-perception. Had Margaret seen her bitterness for the poison it was, she might not have put the papers under the remote, which means she might not have knocked over Randy’s half-full glass of grape juice next to them as she did, right onto their beautiful off-white carpet in their living room, which on the whole was in about as mint condition as a living room can be and still have people doing in it what the name implies. And she might not have screamed at the top of her lungs and thrown the remote, which then hit their beautiful living room window (Windexed twice weekly by Margaret) and landed in their beautiful professionally landscaped bushes just outside. And she might not have walked down into the basement to get the carpet cleaner, seen that giant purple punching bag hanging in front of the washer, and decided to commit a greater act of violence against it than her rage-filled husband had ever tried.
She pulled a box cutter out of the toolbox on the shelf to the right of the dryer, pushed the little switch to see the satisfying gleam of the blade in the light coming in from the high basement window behind her. Gorgeous light from a clear Nebraska sky. There was something romantic about this blade in a sickly way. She was going to enjoy this. Which says something about the important choices we make, but I won’t linger on it here.
She tried to get the point of the blade into the bag, but its material was thicker than she’d expected. She was more stubborn than the bag expected, and once she got it in, she carefully but angrily slid it all the way down to the bottom. She made the mistake of putting her left hand under the box cutter as her right slid it downward at one point, and so when she slipped up a bit she cut her left thumb deeply. But it was worth it. Maybe it was even fitting.
The two things Randy had loved in this house had damaged each other, just as he had done to each of them.
When Randy sat down in Jerry’s BMW again after being discharged from the hospital, he was a different man, just with the same broken right hand. He was walking the path trod well by more brother pilgrims than he could have numbered. And for every pilgrim there were ten scoffers, but by God’s tender providence none of them were in that BMW with him, and so the fragile green chute that was Randy’s new faith in the Jesus who could and would bleed to pay for the sins of men like him strained up from the ground, unhindered by the thorns just yet. For one car ride, Randy smiled and wondered what new joy tomorrow might hold. Jerry kept talking, well intentioned and wise, but Randy had trouble focusing on it and never remembered later what it was he’d said on that drive. He did remember leaning back in the the leather seat, letting his hand dangle out of the passenger’s side window, his broken hand no less, just enjoying the feeling of the air on his skin. He remembered the sun glistening off the mirror in front of his hand. Gorgeous light from a clear Nebraska sky. He remembered not being able to stop smiling. It was like the day of his wedding, but he’d have had trouble telling you exactly why. Maybe he could have said it had something to do with the fact that everything felt in front of him. What Jerry had explained to him, what he’d given him, changed tomorrow. It charted a new course for a life Randy hadn’t even thought much about living.
The longest one-on-one conversation between Jesus and another person recorded in the Bible is one between Him and a woman with some fundamental similarities to Randy. It was at a well, in a town outside Israel proper with a woman who was not merely apart from God’s people but apart from God. Her biography was shot through with the fracture, divorce, that Randy had no idea was waiting for him at home on the living room table where the remote would have been if it were not in the bushes in the front yard. And perhaps most similar to Randy was the simple fact that she had the wrong treasure. In the core of her heart stood created things, rather than the Creator. And from that flowed of lifetime of sin and shame and fear.
One of the most surprising things about being changed by Jesus is that the things we used to worship we can now simply love appropriately. Randy still loved Margaret very much, still wanted to keep her safe and smiled when he thought only of her soft blond hair and quick wit and shining green eyes. But he hated being married to her because her respect of him, her admiration of him, had become something he could not live without. And since he had had to live without it for years, now, he was what we all are when we live without our needs: A craving, miserable wreck (his was simply caked over with an undeniable big guy charm). Randy had such a cluster of bitterness and anger and fear that he nursed and protected that he could barely remember what it felt like to enjoy his wife, laugh with her, forgive her, until the few spare moments when she would surprise him with some small gesture or word and his tender love for her reacted before his pride.
The woman in John chapter 4, the frequently divorced outcast Jesus had sought, had run back to tell her town about the man she had met, wondering whether He might be the long-promised Savior. Randy was not wondering, but like her he was running back home. He had told Jerry where he lived, and asked him to take him to his house so that he could (his words) have the hardest conversation of his life. He didn’t care about his Saturday afternoon appointments or about what Mark would say (Jerry actually took care at that for him, calmly telling hotshot GM Mark that Randy had some things to tend to and would not be back for the day, then serenely nodding as Mark swore and yelled and threatened to write him up and then became uncomfortable with the fact that this mature, good-hearted man in front of him was simply staring at him pleasantly, and eventually quietly sat down as Jerry exited the office). Randy cared about asking for Margaret’s forgiveness. He had the simple, lovely desire to reconcile with her and make her happy. In the course of two hours, everything he thought the world and he himself had been had unspun and rewound in reverse. He had been filthy, selfish, and hungry in ways he’d never known or understood. Now the Author of his soul and body, the Author of every soul and body anywhere, had chosen to love him and forgive him. And on this one car ride there was simply no room in his head for bitterness or anxiety.
His biggest smile came when Jerry turned his black BMW down the side street in Randy’s ten-year-old posh subdivision. His heart was pounding, but he was also honestly happier than he’d ever been in his life. Had he known the story of the woman at the well in John 4 yet, he could have understood why she ran home. Jerry couldn’t drive fast enough.
But the first thing he noticed when Jerry passed Randy’s house to turn around in the cul-de-sac (their house was the last on the left) was that the left living room window was broken. His heart backflipped in his chest. His initial thought was they had been robbed, because that’s always your first thought when you come home to find a broken living room window at your house. And sweetly, his first emotion at that thought of a robbery was panic that Margaret might have been hurt.
With Jerry waiting in the car confused by the same sight, Randy walked quickly up to the front door, unlocked it, and opened it, immediately calling out Margaret’s name. When she didn’t answer, his stomach dropped to his ankles. A terrible image of her dead body in the upstairs office where she did some work from home on weekends overwhelmed him. He ran upstairs and continued calling her name, loving her impossibly despite all his years of disinterest, and was as confused as he was scared when he found her nowhere, and found nothing missing. Not in the office, not in the bedroom, not answering his calling. But when he came back down the steps into the living room his eyes naturally landed to his right, in the middle of what was normally a pristine setting. There was a bright purple stain on the carpet, a dirty towel on the living room table in front of the couch he’d slept on the night before, and a stack of tri-folded papers right where he normally left the TV remote control.
He sat on the couch as he read them. He cried for the first time as an adult, and he was unsettled by the fact that he couldn’t stop. After about five minutes Jerry came in, looking around since he wasn’t sure what he was walking into, but then quietly he sat next to Randy. After a moment of silence, Randy looked to his left, and through the blur of his unstoppable tears he saw that his friend was praying. And he couldn’t seem to think clearly anymore, wanting to rip up formal papers that said nothing about why he’d been a bad husband or why she wouldn’t forgive him for it but not able to do anything more than put his head on his crisp, dry cleaned slacks and sob louder and harder. He felt Jerry’s hand land on his back, and he loved him for it, but he couldn’t register it beyond bare gratitude that someone else somewhere also knew this was happening. Which meant it was real. Which made him cry harder.
It was three hours later before Jerry left, and when he did Randy was holding two things. He still has one of them. It’s folded neatly in a box at the top of his closet in the bedroom of the house he’s a guest in. A dish towel, stained with blood.
Margaret took the box cutter with her.