Run. And don’t look back.

Whenever a Christian follows authority figures who don’t allow questions about themselves or their direction or teaching, get out and don’t look back. Whenever someone says he knows what’s best for your life, better than you do; whenever someone says that she speaks for God; whenever someone pretends to be anything other than a flawed human being who makes mistakes and sometimes gets it wrong — that person is sitting on a pedestal of his or her own making, and if you don’t destroy it, God will. So many freedom-destroying things we do are connected to an irresponsible decision to allow others to be to us what only God is supposed to be.

Steve Brown

unlovelies

Have you ever noticed that the person everyone wants to be friends with doesn’t need (or want) more friends?

Have you ever noticed the person who really needs friends seemingly does everything to push people away from him?

In school, it might just look silly or reinforce the cast system displayed in Saved by the Bell or Can’t Buy Me Love.  For most of us, we use people’s oddities or personality or sin or hygiene as an excuse not to love them.  And often it seems that the people who are so hard to love are hard to love on purpose.  “The degree of one’s power to estrange will increase in direct proportion to the depth of need for others,” writes Franz Wright.  {Yet another nugget from God’s Silence}

Of course I think of Chesterton:  “Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

Neighbor Rosicky

“In the city, all the foulness and misery and brutality of your neighbors was part of your life.  The worst things [Rosicky] had come upon in his journey through the world were human,–depraved and poisonous specimens of man.”

But Rosicky is the opposite of all that.  He is good and gentle and has “a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for colour.”  I fell in love with Anton Rosicky when a friend shared Willa Cather’s story with me.  And again when I read this story to Lauren.

You must read this short story.

 

 

It is a story with many beautiful themes.  Perhaps one is the impact a life can have that genuinely loves those around him.  Also, monetary gain may be an impediment to the good life.

Sometimes the Doctor heard the gossipers in the drug store wondering why Rosicky didn’t get on faster.  He was industrious, and so were his boys, but they were rather free and easy, weren’t pushers, and they didn’t always show good judgment.  They were confortable, they were out of debt, but they didn’t get much ahead.  maybe, Doctor Burleigh reflected, people as generous and warm-hearted and affectionate as the Rosickys never got ahead much; maybe you couldn’t enjoy your life and put it into the bank, too.

I love Mary and Anton’s relationship:

Life had gone well with them because, at bottom, they had the same ideas about life.  They agreed, without discussion, as to what was most important and what was secondary.  They didn’t often exchange opinions, even in Czech,–it was as if they had thought the same thought together.  A good deal had to be sacrificed and thrown overboard in a hard life like theirs, and they had never disagreed as to the things that could go.

If you do not fall in love with Rosicky–er.  for those who are not as free with emotion:  If Rosicky’s kindness and wisdom does not touch your heart, I will bake you cookies.  or knit you a scarf.