So You Will Remember

In dark, candlelit room, a young man enters and kneels before a dying older man. The older man is his estranged father, a knight and lord. His father says: “Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright that God may love you. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong. That is your oath”. The father lovingly removes his ring, the symbol of his power, and hands it to his son. He then backhands him across the face. “And that is so you will remember it (the oath)”.
That is one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, The Kingdom of Heaven. Much like the main character in the movie, I had a poor relationship with my Dad, though mine was all too present and yet distant when I was growing up. As a result, I have very little reference for what a healthy father son relationship looks like.
One of the things that has been hardest for me to deal with in living out my faith, is that God calls himself a father. As Donald Miller once pointed out, “…with all the fathers abandoning their children, calling yourself a father seems like bad marketing”. One of the things that I have heard pastors say, is that your relationship with God often mirrors your relationship with your father.
For me, because my Dad was angry and abusive, I often see God as angry and disappointed in me, and sometimes I see the bad things that happen in my life not as tests or lessons or just something that happens, but as something done to hurt me simply because he can. I have recently been struggling with this. In December, I lost my job. The school I had been teaching at lost funding for a foreign teacher. This was particularly bad because I was planning on leaving Beijing for good in July, and having my contract broken mean that I would meant that I would need to find a new job, I would be without income for a while, and I would lose my bonus. All that money being needed for a move to Europe that I thought God want me to make.
For the past three months, I have been in a bad place mentally and emotionally, I had two options, go home to America or take a new contract and stay longer in Beijing. I felt like God wanted me to stay in Beijing, but I couldn’t, and still can’t figure out why. I like Beijing, but it is a hard place to live and I am burnt out on it. There has been a lot of pain during this time, I thought God wanted me to go, I wanted me to go, what happened?
It wasn’t until today that I realized that the situation I am in might be like the slap that Balian’s father gave him, “this is so that you will remember it”. In that scene, the father didn’t slap him for fun. He took off his ring to minimize the pain. But in the end the slap still had to happen. And it happened because it was part of the learning process.
I’m Beginning to realize that pain doesn’t equal failure and failure doesn’t equal defeat, and both can happen even when you are doing everything right. In the end, I know that the best victories are covered in blood and tears. And sometimes you need a slap so that you will remember the lesson.
Again, I want to stress that while all this sounds cruel to human understanding, I don’t think it is. I think there is a divine design that we can’t possibly comprehend on this side of eternity. I think God, like Balian’s father tries to minimize the damage done to his children in these times. I also want to point out that I am not talking about times when we rebel against god and get the consequences of our actions, I am talking about those times when we are following God wholeheartedly and doing everything that we should be doing, and the rug gets pulled out from under us. Also, just so I don’t any letters from the nutbags, I’m not advocating beating your kids, it was an illustration.
I think great things are going to come from my added time in Beijing and I think that when I look back on those things, they will be even greater because of the start they had and the fact that I had to lean into serious discomfort for them to happen.