Three gifts, three stories.
There was a man lying at the entrance to a temple in Acts 3, lame since birth. Peter and John pass by on the way to the temple, and he asks them for a gift. What he wanted was the gift of money.
Peter levels with this guy—he’s got no cash flow. But what he has instead is way better. “In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, rise up and walk.” He gives this man the name of Jesus Christ, and by doing so, heals him of his paralysis.
The previous times I had read through this chapter, I thought that God was marvelous in juxtaposing these two gifts: that of money (what we think will solve our problems), and that of the solving of our problems.
There’s actually a third gift.
Peter, John, and the no-longer-lame man holding on to them, walking, leaping, and praising God, move to Solomon’s portico, where a crowd gathers at the miracle. Peter then gives everyone present the third, greatest gift. He tells them the truth of God’s work on earth in the last few months: Jesus, the Author of life, was killed and raised according to the foreknowledge and will of God. Repent therefore and turn, that your sins will be wiped away, so that seasons of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord and that He may send the Christ.
The third gift is calling us to (1) turn back to God, and (2) wiping away all our sins so that (3) we may be in the presence of God and that (4) He may send the Christ to us.
So there are three tiers of gifts in this chapter. Would we be mollified by God giving us money? Maybe we’re a little higher, and we’d be content if He would just do some miracles in our lives. But the greatest gift is yet to come. If we stop seeking after getting these consolation prizes, then we may miss out on the greatest gift, God Himself.
On a surprisingly related note, the day before I read that chapter I was having lunch with a Buddhist parent of a former student, and he confessed he had always been curious about why Christians believed what they did.
“I have experienced a few miracles, you see,” he admitted. “When I was in France, I visited a cemetery, very pretty. But when I got back to Taiwan, I just couldn’t sleep. Night after night, I couldn’t sleep. Finally, I went to the Buddhist temple and do you know what they told me? ‘This is common, you brought something back with you. We will tell it to leave.’ But after futilely trying to get the demon to leave for a while, they told me, ‘We are having a hard time. This demon doesn’t speak Chinese.’ They eventually got it to understand that it had to leave. But that’s the first thing that made me think, these Buddhist people know things.”
He had more stories. “When I was young and foolish with my first large windfall from work, I did what most people did my age, which was invest it. I invested and did very well. But there were two times when I went to the Buddhist temple, and they told me, ‘No matter what, don’t invest your money.’ Of course, each time, I didn’t believe them. But lo and behold, I invested my money, and I lost almost everything. I went back to the Buddhist temple and the Buddhist monk looked at me askance and said, ‘You invested your money, didn’t you? You are the kind of person who doesn’t listen to instructions. You read the end of the book before flipping to the front.’ I was speechless. Not even my wife knew about my secret tendency to find out a book’s ending before starting to read the beginning. That’s when I knew, there was something to this Buddhist thing.”
My mother and I did the requisite ooh’s and ah’s and is that so’s? and oh really’s. Then he passed the ball into our court.
“So if I may be so bold, what makes you believe in the Christian God?”
Chinese gospel preaching mode, on. I told him about the yawning hunger in every person’s being, of the wretchedness of the rich and powerful, of the vacuous lies of materialism. I told him about the incomparable realness of a life lived with God filling that void. And the gift of a life with purpose, with a direction and a goal in sight.
He asked, unflapped, “Well, what about miracles? What miracles have you seen done?”
I answered, “What we think of as a miracle is getting stuck in traffic with three minutes to go before you’re late to the meeting. And we sit there and desperately plead, ‘God, if You’re real, pluck me out of this jam and get me to my meeting on time. Or freeze the clocks at the office. Something! Anything!’ and somehow a bolt from the blue makes you slide into the office on time. That’s our idea of a miracle. Some improbable event, occurring just in the nick of time to ward off a seemingly inevitable big bad. So the miracle happens, you say some thanks to the air and keep on living your life. But the real miracle is that (here my Chinese puttered out and I had to journey on in English) such unworthy people, people who have always thought ‘what can God do for me’ rather than ‘what can I do for God,’ are the people God wants to live with and in. (Then I tried again in the Chinese.) The miracle is that our lives, otherwise meaningless, can be filled with meaning and purpose. It’s that our lives don’t have to be about making money, getting education, making your own family, being comfortable, and dying. I think that’s more of a miracle than telling you the right choices for playing the stock market.”
The parent wasn’t thoroughly impressed by this explanation. I guess he was looking for miracles like healing, tongues, and foretelling. But I spoke only about eternity.
A week earlier than that, I was speaking to another student’s parent while driving her back to her hotel. All through dinner, her eyebrows seemed to be drawn together as if there were implanted neodymium magnets in her head. What if her son ____ and ____, then he won’t ____! But he has to ____ in order to ____…
As a tutor, my job is to take her collosal goals and julienne them into daily bread. The more I can feed her son, the weaker the brow magnets will get. I hope. But I wish I could feed him with something nutritious, something substantive and meaningful. I wish his goals could be primarily his, not hers, and that they’d be the best goals possible.
This month I’ve been freestyling in some whitewater rapids of work. My life has thoroughly changed. I went from sleeping on my living room floor to a real bed to a completely different house.
I had been quietly pondering the rips in the toes and heels of five year old sneakers for a few months; new shoes made their way to me for free, without my having to ask. A curious occurrence.
My companions and I are spear fishing in the vast inland tide of freshmen for those who would love the Lord’s appearing with us.
And Madagascar, slowly receding to dimness, is being metabolized into Powerpoints and presentations and publication.
And at dinner every now and then I get that familiar whiff of formalin from my fingers — gross anatomy is back in earnest.
Florence has machinated against the east coast, and as a casual casualty, I was forced to run a mile in torrential (but warm) downpour in nothing more than a T-shirt and drenched jeanskin to stroll, shivering, in a pathology lab full of sliced brains. While running, I alternately laughed at how ridiculous my life had become and squeegeed water out of my eyes and wiped off my opaqued glasses with a dripping shirt. Later, I wrung out cupfuls of water from my shirt into the toilet.
First year students asked me, how do you do medical school and also God?
I think the question is backwards. In the overweening deluge, how do you live if you don’t breathe?
