Of Bears and Penguins

Advent 6:
I was reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe today, and I came to the part where Mr. Beaver says of Edmund, “Treacherous.”

In my mind I could hear the voice of my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Smith who read the book aloud to us in her class. She did different voices, and the beavers were a trembly, creaky voice, and subsequently that is how I hear them whenever I read the story now.

God bless Mrs. Smith. It happened later that her daughter and I became dear friends, but when I was in her class, I am ashamed to say that I was a rotten, smart-alecky, disrespectful git – and that’s putting it rather kindly.

It would serve my vanity to have all you readers go on thinking that I’m charming and kind and wonderful, and to never let on that I have shabby and mean things about me, but that, alas, would be untrue.

I can’t explain why I was terrible in her class, but I was. I am ashamed to say that I just decided I didn’t like her much, or her class and acted accordingly. However, Mrs. Smith was always patient. And because her daughter and I are fast friends, I found out that the Smiths prayed for me at their dinner table that year.

Mrs. Smith is the praying-est woman I know, and that’s really saying something. Her go-to action in any situation is, “prayer.” She also can quote scripture at length, not in an irksome way, but in the same way that someone might say, “Would you like a cup of tea?” One time, Mrs. Smith, her daughter, my Mom and I and other assorted friends were at book club, and Mrs. Smith related the theme of a short story to scripture and her daughter said, in a very teenage tone, “Mom, do you have to bring everything back to God.” That is Mrs. Smith to a tee.

There are some folks who would never let you forget a shabby thing you’ve done – I’m sure you’ve met some, and I’m sure there are times when we’ve all been that person. And because they won’t ever let you forget that thing, no matter how far you’ve grown past it, it becomes a loathsome, inescapable millstone.

That is the opposite of grace and of forgiveness. The scriptures are so full of folks who aren’t on the whole bad, but they do something small and untoward, and consistently God welcomes them back, He restores. I can’t think of one time that Jesus made anyone feel small or burden them with an action they were ashamed of – the way He so gently restores Peter after Peter’s frightful betrayal – what love, what grace, what hope for the rest of us poor fools.

Bless her heart, Mrs. Smith has never made me bear my sorry-fifth-grade self around my neck. When I see her she welcomes me as though I’d been an absolute doll in her class, she is kind and gracious and somehow I just know that she doesn’t remember how terrible I was when she looks at me. She acts like she was confident all along that I’d turn out fine. And that is how Mrs. Smith shows Jesus to me.

Jesus extends grace to us, grace that keeps our past wrongs from being millstones, grace that gives a way back to relationship and reconciliation, a way to become the people that God means for us to be.