For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.~W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Over the weekend, I read a disturbingly beautiful book. Can the words disturbing and beautiful harmonize? The book, Where The Light Fell, by Philip Yancey, seems to fit this uncanny description. Yancy writes of his boyhood in Georgia during the fifties. He had an older brother, and the boys were raised by a single Christian fundalmentalist mother who offered them both a steady diet of religious rules and shame. Yancey defines his upbringing as "ungraced." While in college he had what he defines as "the first authentic religious experience of my life." 

He says of his "vison" of the parable of the Good Samaritan: "A swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face--one I recognize with a start as my own. In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me--the apostate who doesn't believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless...all that evening i brood over what took place. It wasn't exactly a vision--more like a vivid daydream or an epiphany. Regardless, I can't put the scene out of mind...In my arrogance and mocking condescension, maybe I'm the neediest one of all."

Yancey's epiphany eventually moves him toward a relentless curiousity regarding the grace of God. Inside his strict and toxic upbringing and hundreds of church services and read-throughs of the Holy Bible, he missed the truth of the gospel. Yancey's story is like my own. At one point in my life, I was at that dangerous juncture of renouncing my faith in Christ. Yet when I faced the reality that I had broken most every rule that I prided myself in keeping, and saying aloud, "I'm done with this whole religion thing," that's when I owned the fact that God was still good to me--showed up in my life when I knew I didn't deserve it. He wooed me back to Himself with compassion and love, with His father's heart. I was that bedraggled soul in the ditch that spit in His face. Yet he wiped my brow and tended my wounds and carried me to a safe place. I was gutted by His grace, by His mercy, by His forgiveness. I understood that salvation was not "do good, get good/do bad, get bad." Salvation was receiving the tenderness, allowing His ministrations. That kind of unconditional love does not stir up a desire in me to sin more. That kind of rescue causes me to be grateful, humble. "Let me be faithful to you," I say now. Christ's love is otherworldly. His love is not disturbingly beautiful, but rather unfathomably beautiful.

There is a lot of pain in this world. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out our response to both the ache and simultaneous sweetness of life.  There is, though, the reality of the light of Jesus. May His light fall on all your shadowy places and bring you salvation, consolation and hope.