Overheard

Overheard

I’d stopped for a bite at a local café and slipped into a small booth by the window. My back was inches from the diner on the other side of the bench, and I was less than six feet from his companion. I had figured them for coworkers when I sat down and wasn’t paying attention to their words at all until I heard the woman say, “I’m really into spirituality now. I think each of us has a soul.” Then she surprised me by announcing that she’d been doing a lot of reading and had concluded that Satan was a myth. God, she insisted, was behind most of the evil in the Bible. When people got out of line, he obliterated them.

Then the conversation took an unexpected turn: “I really didn’t know what I was doing when I had you,” the woman said. “I was too young. We shouldn’t have kids when we’re that young. I mean, Mary was, like, fifteen or something. (I assumed she was talking about Mary the mother of Christ but couldn’t ask.) “When you’re old enough to do a good job of it,” she added, “you don’t have the stamina anymore.”

There was silence, then the man she was with said, “You did okay. I had food to eat, and you checked on whether or not I went to school. I turned out all right.”

What I had first heard jarred my apologetics-fixed brain into gear. But the real destination of the conversation broke my heart. The two people I’d thought were coworkers were mother and son. And they hardly knew each other.

Here’s what separates me from the woman I overheard: I believe I’ve been rescued, not punished, and that the same one who rescues is able to keep, help, and heal me in any circumstance of life. I believe he heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, restores the years the locusts have eaten, and pleads my case before the throne of God. And what I heard that day at lunch only made me more sure. Not less.

Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives.

Galatians 5:25, MSG