The Grace of Gracious Memories

The Sunday crowd surged around me. Navigating in that environment with a wheelchair takes some concentration, so I was focused on the waitress who was leading my wife and me to our table. Once again, the week's strongest memory may have come from a voice behind me. The question in a preschooler-parent conversation was drowned out by the commotion around it, but the parent's tensely hushed," I don't know," was distinct. Observing my wheelchair passing, the little student of the world probably asked, "Why is he like that?"

Had such a question, spoken or unspoken, come from an honest inquisitor in my field of vision, I would have snapped to attention. With Pat Conroy's narrator Will McLean in Lords of Discipline, I would have considered it my military duty to appear to be in a good mood. I am, after all, a diplomat for the disabled the world over. The initial impression I make on a person that young may shape how they see people with disabilities for the rest of their lives. If I show fatigue, or I'm complaining about the weather, or the one out of 20 encounters on my job that don't happen to affirm me, he or she may unconsciously attach the concepts of "misery" and disability". After forming that perspective before they can speak it, it may be that much more difficult for someone they encounter in five or 10 years who has a disability to "prove" that life with visible physical limitations can be fulfilling and fun.

My message discipline lapsed this time. If this particular child had any protean thoughts on the place of suffering in the world he formed without my tutelage, he kept them to himself. He used his previous experience to process the encounter. Machine? Check. Moving? Check. Something like a cattle puncher at the front with length in the back? Check. He offered his charitable assessment aloud that encountering me was a positive to be filed away with one of his other passions for future consideration. "Bye-bye, choo-choo."

The pint-size prophet's was the second voice reminding me that we have blessedly limited control over the impression we make. The previous adjustment on that subject came not from the mouths of babes, but, just as distinctly, from the quaintness of a handwritten missive from the U.S. Postal Service. Saturday's mail conveyed the best wishes of the surgical staff who assisted me through a routine procedure. I dismissed it as a rote gesture, but I read it at the insistence of my more thoughtful wife. In the middle of the standard best wishes, one of the nurses had written out a Scripture reference from the first 11 verses of the fourth chapter of Matthew's Gospel. This individualized message didn't come with every get-well wish, nor was it the result of my message discipline.

If I left an impression in the hospital ward that was more memorable than the usual daily pressures and complaints, doing so wasn't the product of a formula. As with the tyke in the restaurant,  previous experience combined with momentary memory in a way I could not contrive or control. Approaching surgery,  I was DETERMINED to be God's Missionary through my extremely smallbore "suffering". Schedule my surgery midday? I will "make an effort" because my faith says I should. With all the mechanization of contrived grace, I'll extend my patience for exactly the nine hours and 22 minutes I'll be forced to fast. I'll use every mention of food and fasting to point out that Christ went without food for 40 days out of love for His Father and for me. Ironically, I won't stop to think that my time-limited sense of duty conveys a stilted impersonation of the passionate devotion behind Matthew 4:1-11. Stretch my mustered force of will beyond what I told myself to expect, and, just as Screwtape advised, I'll quickly show my true motivations. With initial enthusiasm, I began this missionary journey pointing to Christ without giving the specific Scripture reference whenever I was asked about food. Even the most charitable or self-deluded analysis of my words while a patient would calculate I did a lot more complaining than expressing gratitude to Christ or anyone else.

It is the grace of grace, that protects, preserves, and enriches the best we remember. Forced and readily lapsed as my efforts may have been, they made an impression more long-lasting than my resolve. God worked in this nurse's heart to instill those verses, almost certainly before I arrived and mentioned them. Her most positive impression of me connected to a nourishing root system already in place, just as the little boy connected me with his love of trains. The phenomenon is at work, I suspect, even among those who don't express encouragement with the colons of biblical references. Those who have found life and people most satisfying because they go into each encounter on a quest for, or at least open to, whatever is pure, and lovely, and of good report, are going to find it – even among patients so far removed from our usual self-satisfying routines. Likewise, when those best at sifting for and focusing on the affirmative moments in life find something worth reflecting on, they are going to share it in a timely affirmation.

If the genuine affirmers and affirmed are freed from formulae and obsession over impression, we grow into discipline of a different variety. Acknowledging readily that we are inconsistent creatures, we won't aspire to manage impression consistent with our self-assigned label. Lasting impression is left to the steady progression of time and a kaleidoscopic variety of people who enter and exit any life. One plants. Another waters. We will, as reality TV figure Anna Dugger resolved under conditions of family upheaval and public scrutiny more difficult than anything we are likely to face, humbly strive to do the right thing for the next 15 minutes. If we leave the patchwork quilt of overall, character-forming impression for others to stitch, then at least the patch we contribute in a given conversation, in a given moment in time can reflect the best of what we enthusiastically, genuinely believe. Renewed by positive memories and realistic self-expectations, we can aspire to what Will Davis, Jr. called the fifty-year view of our suffering when goaded toward believing that others have imposed upon us. We know ourselves too well to honestly resolve once and forever, or even once for the duration of a particular challenge that we shall suffer in such a saintly fashion. For THIS moment, THIS conversation, THIS perceived slight or inconvenience, perhaps I can take the fifty-year view and react rather than respond. Looking backward, who knows how faithfulness in this particular moment might be used?