I was a very stoic kid. Despite the severe brokenness in my family, despite reoccurring cases of clinical depression and anxiety amongst those who were near and dear to me. Despite the fact that there were various financial hardships, and despite getting in trouble for things at school that weren’t my fault. Through it all, I was a very unemotional kid.
Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.
There is this belief that dwells among the community of those who believe in God, who believe in God’s sovereignty, His goodness, His power, His omniscience. It is the belief that God has it under control and so we should be strong, we should be steadfast and unwavering, we should be living testaments to what we believe by how we hold onto the truth of His good and perfect will for us and for our splintered world.
We should trust. We should know. We need not doubt.
I’m not saying that I knew this as a kid. I’m not even saying that I know this for sure as an adult. But I think that this unspoken belief affected how I interacted with my hurts. There were moments when I felt fractured and alone, when I wanted to melt into the ground at the end of the day, and never return. And somehow this world and my experience of it as being black and white and harsh did not match the colour and the vibrance of the gospel which I had been told. And yet I thought that faith — unswerving, uncompromising faith — was the magic bullet. Some days I felt like I missed the line-up on the way into this war: the line-up where God was handing out guns and magic bullets.
Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.
This week, I wrapped up a series of midterms. I was exhausted and so I decided to check out for the evening by watching The Good Wife. The protagonist is an incredibly strong and unflappable woman under impossible circumstances. I was a little down by the end of the pilot episode, and so, instead, I picked up a book that I’d been meaning to read: The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I had watched the movie, but I’d been wanting to get to the book for awhile. The protagonist is a bumbling, awkward, deep-thinker of a teenage boy, fretting over and wrestling with all the things that seem to come with that weird time of life.
I love the book. I love it because he says things (or, at least the author does) that resonate deep within the core of our culture, a culture that is also fretting over and wrestling with all the things that come with this weird time in history.
The Oscars were the other week. The toughest race this year was for best actor and we were all pretty certain that it would come down to Chiwetel Ejiofor for 12 Years a Slave and Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club (McConaughey eventually won). We were also pretty certain Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t going to win. Because his prominent role(s) this year was as a cool guy, and cool guys don’t win the Oscars. All kinds of actors of the past have been icons of cool and many of them have been non-winners, including Samuel L. Jackson, James Dean, Paul Newman, Tom Cruise.
James S. Murphy for Vanity Fair wrote this: “[These actors and the characters they embody all share something —] they leave you wondering what it would be like to be them, without ever imagining that you could.” However, we aren’t looking for the cool guys to win.
Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.
Sometimes we imagine what it would be like to perfectly obey the commandment to be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. I think that when we do, we imagine someone stoic, a warrior, a fighter, a hero; we forget sometimes that the heroes of the Bible weren’t very stoic. While some of them may have looked like Tom Cruise (Joseph or David, maybe?), they were certainly not always, if ever, the cool guys. David himself wrote some of the most heart-wrenching verses of the Bible in Psalms, leaving his own heart strewn out over all those 150 chapters.
I think that sometimes we rob the Bible of its richness and depth when we read verses and hold superficial beliefs about them. And I think it hurts community when we act out those beliefs. In a society where most people are hurting just beneath the surface, where we’re all a little insecure and scared of one another, where we all wonder if we’re going to get a job out of university, whether we will ever be able to afford living in Vancouver, I think we need more empathy, more heart-to-hearts, more realness of character, more willingness to cry out to God regarding our weaknesses, and more willingness to admit to each other when we need help.
I don’t think we need more stoicism, I really don’t. We need to hear from more awkward teenage boys. We need more Tom Hanks, who seems to almost always allow the audience to understand, if not fully sympathize with, his character. We need more Davids. We need you and I to live earnestly and openly. We need to understand that the commandment to be strong in the Lord is embedded in an entire Bible that acknowledges our weaknesses, our shortcomings and our fears.
I was a very stoic kid. I think I’m going to be a little less stoic of an adult, pressing into the truth that God wants us as we are, no matter how we feel on a given day, no matter what hurts and envies and feelings of indignation, whatever successes, whatever uncontrollable, rolling bouts of laughter are rumbling in our bellies, whatever weird, unexplainable mood we’re in.
Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power… And pray for me, too. Ask God to give me the right words so I can boldly explain God’s mysterious plan that the Good News is for Jews and Gentiles alike. (Ephesians 6:10, 19 NLT)
Flick photo (cc) by Khánh Hmoong
