One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (13 page)

This extends to our relationships with other people as well. “If I can’t do it, you had better do it for me.” “If I can’t get it done, you have to get it done for me.” Parents frequently do this with their children. They try to live vicariously through them, because they’re disappointed in themselves. They hope their children will become everything they’ve failed to be, and as any child knows, that is a terrible burden to put on the shoulders of a kid. “I can’t be happy unless you do well. You have to become the best that you can be, so I can feel like I’m okay.”

Again, the burden we place on one another’s shoulders to be our messiah is the result of having a low view of the law—a we-can-do-it approach to life. If our foundational presupposition is that we can keep the law, then when we fail, we will look around for someone to keep it for us, to be our functional saviors. We will look to our spouses or kids or coworkers and say, “I can’t do this, but you’d better! If you can perform for me, life might be worth living, and I can silence the siren cries of all my faults and failures.”

In case you can’t tell, I am convinced that a low view of the law and our need for grace is the number one cause of relational breakdown. You don’t have to be a marriage therapist to see that some form of codependency—where one partner feels like the overbearing parent and the other like the irresponsible child—lies at the root of almost all marital strife. We demand that our spouses perform and provide for us—or our spouses demand that of us. “You must save me. I need you to fulfill my unmet needs, because I can’t.” We use one another in the basest and most selfish ways: for our own self-aggrandizement.

One resounding principle here is that expectation is the mother of resentment. When our spouses or friends have failed to meet our expectations, the little-l laws we have set for them with or without their knowledge, we get angry and we blame. The book of James tells us what causes quarrels and fights among us. Ten times out of ten it is our desires, our misguided craving for self-approval. “Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder” (James 4:1–2). That’s right,
murder
—perhaps not with guns or knives, but in our thoughts and with our words. We execute one another in our hearts.

I remember a psychologist telling me once that there is always hope for a couple that is actively fighting. It’s once they stop, once the hurt turns into contempt, when they have effectively killed each other, that the end is nigh.

And yet we foolishly clamor for more and more rules, creating escalating expectations of each other. James goes on to say, “You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:2). We look at the accolades others receive, and we think they should be ours, too, so we fight and quarrel and expect more and more. We all expect others to keep the law (little l or big), even though we don’t. If we had a more realistic view of ourselves, we might find that we had more compassion for our fellow sufferers, but alas, the judgment seat is too comfortable.

Our anger and gracelessness toward other people is rooted in the fact that we are depending on them to provide for us what we cannot provide for ourselves: righteousness, all-right-ness, forgiveness, freedom from guilt, and freedom from the nagging feeling that we’re really not okay (later on we will hear about one such marriage and how it was saved).

People let us down because they can’t give us what we want, and we continue to believe that they should.
For crying out loud!
we think.
Somebody should be able to keep the law for me and make me okay!

We’ve forgotten that Someone already has.

A SHORT DISCLAIMER

The Gospel heralds a great reversal in which acceptance precedes achievement and mercy comes before merit. It may be rare, but we occasionally see this vertical dynamic playing out in inspiring ways in our horizontal relationships. Look closely at the relationships you find most sustaining and least exhausting, and you will inevitably find some element of unconditionality. Look at the transformative experiences with other people, and you will likely find it there, too. As we said in the last chapter, one-way love lies at the root of all positive and lasting transformations in human behavior. When was the last time you watched someone fall in love? There’s always an ugly-duckling-becoming-a-swan aspect to it. A person who is loved in their weakness blossoms. Soon they are exhibiting traits we have never seen before, walking with a newfound confidence; they may even start to look different. It’s miraculous.

The trick here, as we mentioned earlier, is that love like this can never be mandated. It has to come from the heart. Recently, I asked my daughter, Genna, about this while we were in the car together. I said, “Genna, have you ever been truly grateful simply because Mom or Dad told you to be grateful?”

Genna hesitated before she answered, probably wondering if she would get in trouble for being honest. Finally she said, “No.”

I then said, “Let’s say we get in the car after dinner, and I say to you, ‘Genna, did Daddy buy your dinner?’ and you respond, ‘Yes,’ and then I prompt you, ‘Why don’t you say thank you?’ Does that make you grateful at all?”

“No.”

So she says thank you to me not because she’s grateful, but because she wants to comply or because she doesn’t want to feel guilty or get in trouble. Isn’t that how it is for all of us? Unless our gratitude is inspired by an experience of love, it’s not the kind of gratitude that God—or anyone else, really—is interested in. The moment we try to leverage it is the moment it is squashed.

As we noted before, the law-addled human heart tends to take descriptions of grace in practice and fashion them into new, stronger tools that will finally change those we would like to change (in the ways we deem fit). Demand has failed to produce the desired effect, so now we’ll try “grace.” But just because we can’t summon it on our own strength does not mean it doesn’t exist. It does! In fact, as Princess Leia said of Obi-Wan Kenobi, grace is “our only hope” for healthy and/or restored relationships.

Again, real grace is impervious to manipulation. As soon as it becomes attached to an intended consequence (a condition), it is no longer one-way, no longer grace. Grace loves without reference to what may or may not happen—which is precisely why such incredible things do happen! Meaning, one-way love
is
the answer to whatever relational strife you’re experiencing at the moment, but as soon as it’s employed as a fix, it is no longer one-way. It is paradoxical in this respect. The theological way to express this truth is that the command to love is the Law, but the experience of belovedness is the Gospel. This doesn’t mean that
trying
to be loving or gracious with another person is ever a bad thing—of course not! It’s certainly better than being malicious, and to say otherwise would be to make a contract with despair. But when we find loving another person to be utterly impossible, we can rest in the knowledge that when transforming love comes, it will flow without coercion from a grateful heart, not because of an exertion of our willpower. In fact, the human condition being what it is, one-way love more often than not flows in spite of the exertion of willpower.

So I can describe what one-way love looks like in relationships, I can give you plenty of examples, but I unfortunately can’t give you any how-tos (except to pray). All I can say is that, like the law, what matters with grace in relationships is how it is received rather than whatever intentions lie behind it. Which is good news, since even when our actions are unconscious, and the Holy Spirit is guiding our hands, our motives are always mixed. What follows, then, is not an application section—
application
is almost always a code word for
law
. Implication would be more appropriate. Hopefully even inspiration.

GRACE IN FAMILIES

One-way love is often what distinguishes a warm household from a cold one. Children often move across the country to get away from a toxic home life where two-way conditionality has come to rule the roost via the judgments of parents and other siblings. A house full of conditions feels like a prison. Rules are one thing—take out the trash; don’t hit your brother. They govern the day-to-day and protect us from one another. Conditions are different and more emotional in nature. “If you really loved us, then you wouldn’t spend so much time with those people.” “We will approve of whatever career choice you make, provided it’s between medicine, law, and business.” “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” Even small differences between family members can be the source of tremendous friction. Yet grace has the power to bind generations together.

I am fortunate to have experienced the power of one-way love not just from my parents but my grandparents as well. In fact, whenever people learn that I was kicked out of the house at sixteen, they invariably ask how my grandparents responded. What they usually mean is “How did Billy and Ruth Graham respond to actual sin in their midst?” People looked up to them, not just as spiritual leaders, but as role models for how to raise godly children and grandchildren. “Weren’t you shaming the family name?” The truth is, my grandparents never said a single word to me about getting my act together. They never pulled me aside at a family gathering and told me about how I needed to submit myself to Jesus, etc. Never. Only God knows what they were thinking or feeling, but I never picked up on a shred of judgment from them. They treated me exactly the opposite of how I deserved to be treated.

For example, I wore earrings back in those days. One in the left, and one in the right. It used to drive my parents nuts. Every time my grandmother—Ruth Graham—came down to visit, she would bring me a fresh set of earrings to wear! They were always funny. At Christmastime, she would bring me ornament earrings and make me put them in and take a picture. At Thanksgiving, she brought fork and knife earrings, and she took a picture. She made light of it. She wasn’t making fun of me. She was saying, “This isn’t that big of a deal. He’s going to grow out of it.” It may sound pretty trivial, but it meant the world to me. Everyone else was on my case, and instead of giving me one more thing to rebel against, my grandparents drew me in closer.

GRACE IN MARRIAGE

A marriage is a like a petri dish for the weight of conditionality and the beauty of one-way love. Husbands and wives are often so hard on one another, merciless with their demands and expectations, their criticisms and silences. And yet what brought the couple together in the first place was almost always an experience of grace, some connection that transcended their worthiness. As Southern novelist Walker Percy writes in
Love in the Ruins
, “We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away.”
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A marriage founded on one-way love eschews scorekeeping at all costs. It is not a fifty-fifty proposition, where I scratch your back and then you scratch mine. A grace-centered marriage is one in which both partners give 100 percent of themselves. They give up their right to talk about rights. This means that a grace-centered marriage, in theory, is one where both parties are constantly apologizing to each other, asking for and granting forgiveness. No one is ever innocent in a grace-centered marriage. If original sin is as evenly distributed as the Bible claims it is, then even in the most extreme and wounding circumstances, both parties have some culpability.

So often an apology feels like we are betraying ourselves, does it not? We would rather see a marriage fall apart than admit to any wrongdoing or cede any ground in the “war of the roses.” The world tells us to stand up for ourselves, to stick to our guns. But the Gospel tells us to lay down our arms. There is nothing at stake, and therefore nothing to fear, ultimately. Our righteousness, which we are often hell-bent on protecting in a marriage, has already been secured, and it is not our own. This doesn’t mean we let the other person run all over us—we are not Jesus after all!—it simply means that for the marriage founded on one-way love, there is always a way forward.

In 2009, Laura Munson wrote a remarkable reflection on the near dissolution of her marriage for
The New York Times
titled “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear” that captures part of what we are talking about better than any explicitly Christian testimony I’ve ever come across. She recounts a painful afternoon when her husband of thirty years came to her, out of the blue, to tell her that he didn’t love her anymore and wanted out of the marriage. She writes, “[My husband’s] words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, ‘I don’t buy it.’ Because I didn’t.”

Instead of rising to his hurtful words and responding in kind, she surprised even herself by holding her tongue. She knew that her husband was going through a tough time in his career, feeling less than good about himself, and more than likely transferring that inadequacy onto their relationship. But it’s one thing to understand these things intellectually and another to in the moment:

You can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we’ve created. You can bet I wanted to.

But I didn’t.

I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.

And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years … He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.

When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within.
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