We're All Capable of Falling in Love With the Wrong Thing

We’re all capable of falling in love with the wrong thing. That sentence has taken quite a few twists and turns over the past few months since it originally knocked on my mind’s door, rudely interrupting a session of internal venting on the ironies of moral superiority.

I find that with the right sense of humor, the idea that I or any individual can have the final say on right or wrong is quite comical. We are all fallible. Or, like we say when we comfort one another when faced with the evidence of our imperfect actions, “we all make mistakes.” Yet that well agreed upon notion tends to take a timely vacation when it comes to establishing moral laws.

Moral superiority is rampant. It’s incredible to me how right we think we can be as if our own eyes give us the full picture of every experience in every culture in every era and every individualized nuance in between. What’s even more wild is the belief that we can individually create our own moral right and wrong when more often than not, the ‘angel’ on our shoulder directing our path is no more than the mouthpiece of our desire for personal gratification, which in a world with more than one person, cannot exist without conflict.

I, for one, am too awfully aware of how flawed my heart is to think that it has the moral capacity to know all good and all bad.

Whether or not you relate to such a conviction, what I would be surprised to hear is if there is anyone who cannot agree with the words spoken to me when I heard the knock and opened the door – we’re all capable of falling in love with the wrong thing.

Whether it was a person, an idea, a dream, a connection, a decision, a commodity, an expectation or an escape, we’ve all chosen something that led us down a path we didn’t think we chose. These mistakes have a horrifying knack for leveling the playing field. I thought I was better than such and such, but it turns out, I know nothing. It’s embarrassing, really. To find out that you’re just as much of an [insert insult of disbelief] as everyone else.

Here's the conclusion before the conclusion: This life is an enormously complicated pile of trial, error, grace, mercy and redemption. We provide the trial and error, God provides the rest.

We’re all capable of falling in love with the wrong thing. The twists and turns that sentence has taken in my life since it entered have actually kept me from writing this due to my own far too obvious hypocrisy. But what better evidence that the solution is beyond my/our own human abilities than to know it and still fail.

I write this on a Saturday morning. I write this in the midst of emotional chaos because so many things lack sense. I don’t understand what happened, I can’t understand what will happen, and I’m trying to understand where and how I stand in between it all while meeting the basic requirements of life. It’s both frustrating and humbling.

Yet, on this Saturday morning as I throw the ball for my dog, listen for the sound of my finished laundry, and in the back of my head wonder when I’ll have time to fill my empty fridge, the weight of my mistakes and the pain of the mistakes aimed towards me dissipates as I dwell on the grace and mercy made available to me by someone not like me. Not like any of us.

We’re all two steps away from the worst sin we can think of, though we never consider it this way. We don’t think we’re as close as we actually are so we indulge in things that do no harm while our spirits cry out differently. This is reality. But to end here would be treacherous.

While we must admit that we are all capable of falling in love with the wrong thing we must counter that with the truth that we are also all capable of falling in love with the right thing. This is one of the many layers of hope.

How?

That’s the question that’s chased me through all the twists and the turns. How do I walk in a space where I am as close to one path as I am to the other? How do I engage these two paths in relationship with myself, my community (friends, co-workers, church, family), and as dramatic as it may sound, the rest of humanity?

Answer: with grace and with mercy.

Grace, getting what one does not deserve, and mercy, not getting what one does deserve, is a nuisance to perfection but a savior to the imperfect. If I never make mistakes, if I never choose the wrong thing, if I never intended one thing and ended up with the other, I have no need for neither grace nor mercy, nor do I feel particularly inclined to give it to others for if I can achieve perfection then surely everyone else can and should.

But if I do, perhaps, make mistakes. If I do, on the occasion, wish I’d known then what I know now and could have gone a different direction with my words and/or my actions, then maybe I would appreciate the beauty of getting what I don’t deserve and the relief of not getting what I do deserve. In fact, anyone who would bestow such a gift upon me would be counted as a compassionate friend, more interested in my being than in my putting on a flawless production.

But grace and mercy do not come from us. They are not inspired by our personal gratification. They are divine. They come from above the twists and the turns, the differences in cultures and individual nuances, the dreams, expectations, and escapes. Grace and mercy come from the One whose knowledge is not bound by time; the One who can define good because He is good; the One who never falters yet sees us stumble and though He owes us nothing, redeems us.

So while we are two steps away from the worst sin we can think of, we are simultaneously two steps away from receiving this grace, mercy, and subsequently, freedom. Which path we take begins with the decision of whether or not to see ourselves as innately flawed and consequentially unable to decipher all things at all times and in need of someone who knows what we do not.

Denying our limitations leads us towards soothing our souls with our ever evolving moral laws – quick to soothe, slow to cure, and quite ungracious with our fellow man who fails to oblige.

Acknowledging our limited omniscience, and therefore none at all, opens us up to receive grace and mercy from the only One qualified to give them and extend the same compassion to our fellow man. Redeemed from that which we could not overcome ourselves, it’s here that we find freedom not only from the moral failures we are all akin to, but from the expectation of perfection amongst relationship with one another.

I cannot convince you your heart is flawed. I can, however, more confidently claim that you and I both have and will repeatedly fall in love with the wrong thing. Will acknowledging your limitations and seeking God keep you from mistake? No. You will fail as I have. That’s the irony of loving God while being human.

The difference is not your perfection but your redemption.

Without God we are ruled by our personal gratification. It may start harmless, but the more and more we make room for ourselves, the more we compromise what we solemnly swore we would never do. No, not you? Well, take it from me then.

With God, however, if my stubborn self would allow me to make room for Him to guide my decisions, set my moral laws, and for His Spirit to empower me to do what I cannot on my own, I am no longer bound by my limited perspective nor my partial remedies. I am no longer bound to the path that would lead me towards the sin I claim I would never commit, nor the one I already have and wish to be free of. Instead, I am released to walk in the knowledge that the purest form of good, good Himself, has designed a specific and unique path for me while taking into account every mistake I and others make along the way – a direct covering from the blood He shed on my behalf.

Final conclusion: none of us are knowledgeable enough to create right and wrong, none of us are perfect enough to walk without blunder, and none of us are powerful enough to weave every misstep into something irreplaceably good. So then, what more is there to do than submit to the One who is what I am not, to receive and extend the grace and mercy of which I had no part in earning, and to realize that there is no step I can take that when given to God cannot be redeemed.

“As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me! For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me...you are my help and my deliverer, do not delay O my God.” – Psalm 40: 11-12, 17b